I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art.

New York City is still the art capital - every time I'm in New York, I'm thinking about competition.

Like many other kids, I liked watching anime.

I would like to live to 120, because conceptually, people can survive to 120. Every 20 years, it changes. So maybe, in the next 20 years people can go to space. I don’t know what the next revolution will be. I want to watch.

I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art.

We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don't completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.

Galleries in the West have probably been looking for exoticism. That's the reason my paintings initially sold well, I think. And then once they started selling, people said my works were very detailed. They may have represented something Japanese to them.