Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.
In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.
I wanted to contribute to the landscape tradition in art. By now I guess we are comfortable with the thought that man has been everywhere or affected everything in nature.
Really the moment I decided I wanted to do art seriously, I left art school. I wanted to be with people who were interested in the same things I was: popular culture.
I wouldn't say the anthropologists were making art, but they were definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning, passion, and they were also experimenting with form. There was a sense of trying to be as sincere as possible, whether you were investigating something far away from you or very close.
"Naming Tokyo" kicked off at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in June, and it's going to travel to various art institutions for years to come. Every time it is shown, I'm developing the research and involving more and more people in it. The final conclusion of the work would eventually be to put up street signs in Tokyo with my names on them.
