Jia Sung is a Singaporean Chinese artist and educator whose practice spans painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, writing, and translation. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert conventional archetypes of femininity, queerness and otherness. Her recent work explores threads of ecofeminism, ethnoecology, the ecological capacities of the body, invasive species as family, and the potentials of collective and constant human transformation through interspecies dynamics. Her approach draws from that of the Chinese zhiguai tradition, that genre of ‘strange tales’ cannot be translated directly through the lens of horror. The supernatural, the monstrous, the spiritual, seep into the tidy confines of ordinary existence, often humorous, arbitrary, smearing at the boundaries of our reality and then slinking away just as rapidly. Here is shapeshifter, here is trickster, things that inhabit liminal space and refuse to be held in place or form; the profane invades the interior, wilderness enters the domestic space, phenomena defy causation and morality, creature refutes taxonomy.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Jia’s childhood, early influences, and why she chose to dedicate her life to the arts (00:06:14)
- Formative books, films, and mythologies for Jia, Jennifer, and Yoshino (00:08:05)
- Art as a lifestyle and sketching/journaling as a form of expression (00:15:52)
- Jia explains her experiences going to RISD (00:17:03)
- Teaching art and guiding students – Jia shares her approach to teaching, focusing on personal expression over technique (00:18:46)
- Returning to unfinished work (00:22:42)
- Balancing chaos and creativity – reflections on how emotional turmoil can fuel or take away from creative work (00:28:11)
- Identity, ego, and output in art – how artists' identities are tied to their creative output and the challenges that brings (00:33:32)
- Discussing various levels of consciousness (00:40:44)
- Challenges of art school and institutional expectations – Jia reflects on the pressures and baggage that come from a formal art education (00:43:48)
- Breaking away from art jargon and structured critique to find a personal voice (00:54:27)
- Lightheartedly discussing astrology (01:04:04)
- The Artist Decoded Tarot and Jia’s “The Trickster’s Journey” tarot (01:10:27)
- Discussing the potential future of AI (01:18:17)
- Jia’s advice to her younger self (01:30:41)
Episode co-host: Jennifer Sodini
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