He drew under the bed first. The pens were confiscated; the lines moved to walls, paper edges, the back of his own hand. Years later the work would hang in Saatchi, in Beijing, in his own gallery in Berlin — but the gesture had not changed. A line drawn once, on purpose, as if the surface were temporary and the mark were not.

A motorbike crash in Los Angeles ended one life and started another. The football scholarship was gone, painting became something more than a habit, and a therapist looking at his sketches said the word that changed everything: fashion. By 1999 his clothes were at Barneys, on P!nk, on Eva Longoria. By 2002 he was placing burning luxury logos in Women's Wear Daily and refusing to soften the language of his shows.

He began speaking a language he did not yet understand — later he would call it the language of the human body, and mean it literally. The work that came after traced its alphabet onto whatever the moment required. Seventeen models body-painted in a day for Berlin Fashion Week. An Arabian stallion lit in gold in Dubai. One hundred denim jackets donated by Elton John and Woody Allen, painted by hand, raised for refugees.

What the gallery walls hold now is one chapter. The others are sound — Liquid Gold, forty minutes of that language pressed into a meditation; AOI, a light-and-sound chamber that drew four-hour lines in Ibiza and Dubai. The studio was never only about looking. It was about being a person while the line was being made. He is still drawing. The bed is gone; the pens are not.