Where do you live?

Where I lay my head. Currently I'm on tour, so Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Spain, Italy, France, then around the U.S. again. I live, piss and shit all over the earth. But when I get back, I'm in San Jose (California).
There's a mad concert pianist that lives next door. He fucking plays day and night. His place is a giant grand piano and a bed--that's it. It's pretty amazing.

I've lived with people my whole life. Brothers, family, roommates, inmates. The first time I ever had a place of my own was when I was in solitary confinement in Tokyo. Now I'm out and got a little money for breathing room so I just want to be alone. I've had this place for five months, and I've spent maybe two weeks here. I spend most of my time at home sleeping. Decompressing. When I get home, my friends and family want to hang and go out, but all I want to do is sleep, for days. I have the best couch, it's a huge, creamy, off-white vinyl classic that I bought from two gay lovers. I just lay on it and sleep and then sit up and watch some TV, and then crawl onto my fifteen-foot trampoline, do a few back-flips, crawl downstairs and go into a half-hour drum solo and then go back upstairs and fall asleep on the couch.

I don't have any pets because they would all die. But it I've fallen in love with this dog Wally. Last name is Marty. He's like, three different colors. He has no tail, and looks like he's been to hell and back. He lives behind the Wal-Mart here in a little marsh area and he hates humans. He won't come near me. He's harder to win over than any woman I've ever met. I drop by a few times a week and leave some chili dogs near his house. I love that crazy fucker.

I'm on the second floor. When I get home I dump all my rotten bread, stale chips and tortilla shells out the window and I start a feeding frenzy with the seagulls. I'm not even joking--you ever see that movie The Birds? Thousands of seagulls from all over fly and start fighting over the loaves. I guess I just like feeding animals. I guess I could feed the homeless too, but who needs another asshole on this planet? ...Actually that's fucked up.

How would you describe where you live?

It's a 1,500-square-foot loft in downtown San Jose, by the train tracks. I watched a guy take a shit on the tracks and wipe his ass with his shirt, from my window. I have a couch made out of cardboard, my vinyl couch that I never leave, and removable seats from my minivan littered throughout the house. I have three drumsets in different corners of the house, a Sonor, a Tama and a Roland.

I have paintings depicting every scene in the Bible painted by Joseph, my 15-year-old autistic student, all over the place. I have giant stuffed animals leftover from the (toy designers) Friendswithyou show. I have mannequins of all shapes and sizes all over the place. My kitchen area looks a giant version of what my room looked like in jail, sparse and uncluttered. I'm one block from the taco trucks, Too Com Chai (the best Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant in San Jose), Jalisco (where you can get goat stew). The best Vietnamese sandwiches and three different types of fries are all 10 minutes away.

It's nice and cozy. The pace of life here is really slow. People talk, drive, and move really slow. It's annoying at first but then you get used to it. It's dope here. (Pro skater) Steve Caballero has a bunch of people over his house on Mondays for Art Night. There're a shitload of drummers, skaters, and goths here. (Musician) Mike Park and (pro skater) Jerry Hsu live down the street, all the fingerbangerz (DJ crew) are up in this bitch, Gallery A.D. is right around the corner.

This crazy guy Michael Boyd lives one block over and helps me out with making movies and music on my computer. Sometimes we have BB-gun wars with Spongebob playing in the background at the local multiplex because Luis, Manny, and Adrian work there. Michael Boyd has this projector and every videogame ever made on his laptop, so we'll go to the roof of the parking garage and play Street Fighter on all the tallest buildings in downtown, throwing fireballs ten feet wide. It's cool.

It's like there ain't shit going on, so you make up your own shit to do. Everyone here is from here, which gives it a small-town feel even though it's gigantic. It's not like L.A. or New York where everyone's from somewhere else coming over to try and "make it," and act like cartoons of themselves. People always ask me why I live here, and I always give them one guess. Why else? It had to be the girl. [I've been living in San Jose for] 3 years now, and [I'm not sure how long I'll live here.] I travel so much I hardly think about moving or owning property. I thinkmy next purchase will be an amphibious motor-home. I saw it on the news and it got me hard. I've conquered planes, trains, and automobiles, but I don't know shit about the ocean or navigating the seas. But I want to. I love getting-lost-at-sea stories and crazy pirate stories.
Not just the physical structure of my house, but the entire city of San Jose is like a cave. I go out into the world and collect relics and bring them back to my cave and try to make sense of it all. Years ago if you wanted to make it as an artist you had to go to New York, or France, or some shit. I did that anyways, but now with this double-yoo double-yoo double-yoo and FedEx you can live anywhere and add your local flavor. One of the best artists in the world, Aaron Horkey, was living in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Minnesota.

Where do you live?

Shanghai, China. Pudong, to be exact. Pudong is what I would call the "new city", where Puxi would be the "old." Pudong is where all the new buildings in Shanghai are, especially international banks. With little traffic it only takes 20 minutes to get from here to the busy part of Puxi. Because it is so modern, when you are in Pudong, you can easily forget that you are in China.

Though most vinyl toy companies are in Hong Kong, Shanghai is the perfect place to start a company like adFunture. We are close to the factories and can drive to source new and reliable production partners. Within Asia, I mainly stay in Shanghai and visit Hong Kong every three months or so, just to catch up with friends and industry colleagues.

You're juggling two careers. How do you divvy up the time?

I spent most of my time in Shanghai working. Each day is spent managing the restaurant, Red Dot, which looks over the river towards the Bund, an area of Shanghai with lots of 18th century British architecture. The rest of my time is spent with the adFunture projects. I work seven days a week. Over the past year I have transitioned from spending ten hours a day on Red Dot and five hours a day on adFunture, to about twelve hours a day on adFunture and three hours a day working on Red Dot. The restaurant really runs itself now, so I am concentrating on adFunture. I enjoy the adFunture work, so I don't get tired of it.

How would you describe where you live?

The adFunture office is now my temporary home for a few months, while our flat is being renovated. Like many small business offices in China, this space is inside a residential area, not a downtown high-rise. I like that. We are on the ground floor, so going in and out is relatively simple, you don't waste time waiting for the elevator. And the garden out front is very useful when I need to relax for fifteen minutes or so.

Inside the space, we have the adFunture products, the samples, the designs. My own collection is also sitting on the shelves--things that I bought from the open market, and gifts given to me by our fellow designers and toy makers. We have canvases and prints on the walls, mostly graffiti-related images.

The plan was to live here temporary, but now that I've gotten used to it, I don't really want to move back out there.

How is it different from where other people live?

I can't imagine any other homes in Shanghai have these toys, in this volume. I have close to 300 pieces in this apartment. All were hand-carried by myself every time I traveled back and forth from Hong Kong. Keep in mind that Shanghai has only one or two places that sell vinyl toys, in an extremely limited number, therefore my main source for toys is Hong Kong. Most of the toys in my personal collection are still sitting in a Hong Kong warehouse. The collection consists of vinyl designer toys, Star Wars figures, Bearbricks, Sony Capsules, Futura's toys, McFarlene's sports figures, a few Kaws, and Bathing Apes.