Calvin Liang

photograph by Santiago Costa Peuser

Interview by Morgan Becker

Would you rather be colorblind, or lose the ability to perceive textures?

There used to be a time that I was obsessed with having to have some kind of restrictive color palette, but I realized that sometimes the beauty of things is in their disorganization. I think I would be okay actually with being colorblind. What’s rich about black-and-white especially is that it forces you to pay attention to details that we take for granted with color. We associate foliage with green, or the sky as blue, but, there’s details in all of those things—like texture, for example—that we don’t really pay that much attention to when color is present. When we strip that back, I think there’s a whole different story that’s available.

What are the merits of sculpture and architecture over two-dimensional arts, like photography or drawing? Or vice-versa.

Architecture, for me, is art that’s trying to solve a problem. With other [artistic] mediums, I don’t believe that problem-solving is necessarily the goal. I can posit questions, or bring attention to details, but I don’t necessarily have to have a solution. I think the beauty of art is that you get people to think about issues, or even just things that exist in their natural state. And [you] mak[e]ing people question them by putting it in their faces. Different issues and different problems have different mediums. I don’t necessarily have a bias over material or representation. It does come kind of case-bycase for me, really.