Many photographers – Man Ray, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Ren Hang, Robert Mapplethorpe – have used the body as one of their main subjects. Which artists have influenced you most?

I don’t really follow photographers. I consider my work a site-related installation that I document with photography and video. My influences are artists like Yayoi Kusama and her performances in New York in the 1960s, the performance work of Carolee Schneemann, abstract painters like Ellsworth Kelly, and earthwork artists like Robert Smithson and Richard Long. I always go back to their work for inspiration. It happened in the ’60s, but it’s always relevant.

How do you think this affects or connects with your photography work today?

It definitely affects me. I always go back to their work for inspiration. Even though it happened in the ’60s, it’s always relative to what I’m doing today. At the same time, there are so many visuals out there in the world. You look up on social media and you can get lost. With all the video, I think what photography does is it slows things down and makes your mind work, as opposed to trapping you in a forever algorithm. It gives your mind a chance to expand even though it’s a still image. It makes your mind work. What happens beforehand? What happens afterwards?

Spencer Tunick, San Sebastian, Spain, 2006, Pigment print, 152.4 x 121.92 cm, Edition of 6

I guess you are referring to the storytelling behind that image, how our mind knows or interprets stories upon that information.

Exactly. All the answers are not there, and that’s important. Your mind does the extra work. With AI, I think people become lazy.

Your work has a strong connection to LGBTQIA+ communities. How do you approach inclusion?

Simply by saying: anyone can participate. Any gender. Whether you’re traveling from Japan, the Middle East, South America, or Europe, if you can find a flight, you’re welcome. The relationship with the LGBTQ+ community is symbiotic with the original meaning of my work: everyone participates, everyone is celebrated, everyone is making art together.

In fact, I’d love to talk about Gran Spectrum. How did this idea come about, and what drew you to this location?

When they contacted me I was like, yes, immediately. Because it’s very difficult for me as an artist to buy a thousand canisters of body paint in eleven different colors. I would have to sell my car to do that. So I was very lucky to have an organization that sort of became my art store. They enabled me to make an artwork with many of the pride colors, and through that they can attach a message to it, which is a great thing. Even if I’m making an abstraction, that abstraction can become an abstract narrative, or it can send a very specific message. You make art within your own mind, with your own idea, and at the same time it can help a group of people out. That’s what I love about this work, the connection to the LGBTQIA+ community is symbiotic with its original meaning, where anyone can participate, everyone is celebrated, and everyone is making art together.

Each participant receives a limited-edition print from the installation, like a memento of having been part of the piece itself. There is something powerful about art when it doesn’t just invite you to watch, but pulls you in becoming part of it. How do you see that tension between what you create and what participants live?

Participants see the work on my website before they register, so they can already imagine the difficulty of filling a frame of thinking through the relationship between body and background. In a way, they want to help me make it. I become the catalyst for fulfilling their desire to be part of an artwork to be a participant-artist. That’s very rare in the art world, where there are usually strict rules separating the viewer from the work. Being part of the work is a unique thing. And it’s a fine line, it’s very easy for work like this to become trivial or even hackneyed. A significant part of my effort goes into making sure that doesn’t happen.

Your participants suddenly find themselves surrounded by hundreds or thousands of naked bodies. I’m just thinking such encounters may soften their insecurities and open their eyes to the vast variety of gender, age, body shapes and skin colour all around them? How do you perceive that psychological experience for them?

Well, It’s a phenomenological experience for them, because it really is a new feeling, and unusual, when you lie on your back and you raise your head and you see a color field of bodies, it’s an amazing visual sight. It’s something new, you haven’t experienced it before. It’s like you’re a pebble on a beach of a million pebbles. Body as nature, in a way. And with color it’s sort of like being part of a coral in an ocean. It’s quite beautiful, very much like an amazing undersea world.

Whether someone is interested in the body as an artistic expression, such a vast composition and the location absorbs the nudity into a deeper stage that carries a different beauty and a sense of strangeness.

Sometimes the nudity isn’t explicitly visible, it becomes blurred, especially in the backgrounds of my photographs where there is a certain out-of-focus feeling, which I really like. If I were to shoot everything at f/16 or f/22, it would feel more like a document. I’m not trying to make a document; I’m trying to create a quasi-conceptual, quasi-documentary photograph. In that way, the body is treated in a very surreal, fantasy-driven manner, moving it toward abstraction and turning it into an elemental form. On the other side of the work, it’s about spreading good vibes and inclusion ensuring people have a wonderful, one-on-one experience with everyone else and the art project at hand.