Interview: Rick Leong

Good day! How are things going?

Things are going really well, keeping busy.

How did you get your start in design?

I had a friend in the business and he occasionally threw work my way when he was swamped. I basically did the odd design gig while in art school to earn some extra bucks.

What inspires your work?

My Chinese heritage opened me up to eastern aesthetics early on and as I developed it became integrated into my work in different ways. I draw inspiration from classical Chinese and Japanese painting of course but also porcelain, lacquer, cloissonne, manga, anime, etc. and integrate them into a holistic visual language with various nuances.

What types of projects do you most like working on?

The kind where I have the most freedom to articulate my aesthetic and learn something new at the same time.

How would you describe your style?

Asian fusion tempered with a Western sensibility. Like a Chinatown restaurant.

Many of the organic forms you work with are broken into ribbons or bands. Are you thinking of the vascular system or is there another reason for this?

That's not a device that I consciously implemented but developed intuitively. The way that highways and roads can be likened to arteries and even rivers suggests a metaphor for the rhythm and flow of our environments in different contexts.

I am reminded of certain kinds of book illustration when I look at your work. Can you name any particular influences?

I was very interested in Chinese folk tales and myths in my early days of art school as way of investigating my heritage and that heavily informed my earlier work. I have also read countless books to my son throughout the last decade so I suppose visually expressed narratives has definitely had its influence. I also devour manga and anime and those are of course inherently narrative. When making a landscape painting I try to think of the verb or event in the work. There is always something happening in our environment and it can be subtle or extremely dynamic. It could be anything from different phenomena of light interacting with the landscape to a gentle breeze to pollination or even a combination of those elements. As for the characters that articulate these events I draw from early Taoist and Shinto beliefs that every living thing has a spirit. This is also perpetuated in a contemporary way in Disney movies, various cartoons, Japanese anime and children's books. I could certainly name a few obvious examples which are very inspiring such as Miyazaki's Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro, but it's really coming from hundreds if not thousands of sources great and small that are present at every stage of our lives that contributes to our tacit understanding of this kind of work.

What's in the future for you?

Well, design isn't really something that I still do now that my art career has taken off. I am preparing for a group show this fall in Toronto and I am involved in the Montreal Biennial in the spring and then I have a solo exhibition in the fall of 2009 at Parisian Laundry. I am open to exploring some crossover work though as it has some exciting possibilities, like the collaboration between Murakami and Louis Vuitton, or creating a children's book like Yoshitomo Nara.

Thanks for chatting with us!

For more of Rick's work check out his Carbonmade portfolio: http://rickleong.carbonmade.com/