We Have Revelation at Home
An Interview with Artist Jia Sung
“The fun, but also the horror, of visualizing”
Newest York recently sat down with artist Jia Sung ahead of the publication of her first book, a Tarot deck and accompanying guidebook, titled Trickster’s Journey.
How do you describe your work?
I identify as a painter and imagemaker primarily. I work across a few mediums, unified by an interest in drawing, particularly slowing down or complicating drawing, engaging with the surface differently.
Say more about slowing down drawing. Why and how?
I feel like it’s something I talk about with my students a lot. Once you reach a certain level of fluency with drawing, you begin to test the parameters a little. Like with Oulipian constraints: taking the beaten path, whatever your known methodology of arriving at a resolved object is, and then, like a Jenga tower, pulling out little bits to see what you can get away with.
The how, I think, has shifted over time. Working with risograph in my zine work has been an easy and fun way to translate and transform my mark-making, especially given that riso is basically a mechanized version of screen-printing. This interest in slow drawing, and interrupting the surface, has also fueled my exploration of textiles. I’ve been beading and embroidering into my paintings for some time, and recently learned to weave. That’s a pretty new practice, playing with hand-woven tapestry, machine-woven tapestry.
I think a lot about the form of publications. While magazines are typically so collaborative, zines are often just one person. What do you hope to do with zines? Why are they interesting?
The tarot deck I recently published began as a zine, actually! Its first incarnation was an artist book edition of 125, published with Endless Editions. Despite the staggering amount of labor that went into making the original deck by hand — spray-gluing every card together, trimming by hand, everything — producing on such a limited scale can be so freeing.
I've always liked zines for their sense of privacy, this illusion of your own little world. Books are such intimate objects — reading requires that you go inwards to participate. Zines are really attractive to me as a space to explore and iterate through collections of ideas, in a way that feels non-threatening. There's a sense of immediacy, smallness.
Not that there’s less at stake, but less expectation of performance?
Right! Tying back to the Oulipian thread, I think there's almost a sense of tricking yourself into making stuff, which I think a lot of artists do. I don't know why; it’s my job, it’s the main thing I do, but I'm always finding different ways to crab walk up to a new project. Like, “I’m not really starting, I’m just…” [gestures vaguely]
What are your tricks?
I’ve been thinking a lot about tricks — my deck is called Trickster’s Journey. I think compartmentalizing sometimes helps. Almost letting the busy work become the trick, whether it's stretching the canvas or starting to research or just collecting images, laying down the lexicon for new work. Any action that can be broken down into a “Oh, I’ll just… for no reason…”
There’s the fun, but also the horror of visualizing — having a really active imagination, larger ambitions for your work, a desire to make something really good. There’s a sense of pressure that comes from roleplaying out an entire project inside your mind, stepping back to reality, and then feeling like, “I'm so busy, I'm so tired. How am I going to get there? How do I live up to that fantasy?”
You can only do one thing at a time, but then as it gets stretched out further, the pressure of expectation becomes larger.
And the longer it takes you to do it, the more there's a sense of now having to compensate for the “time lost” not being “productive” by raising the stakes even more, which only saps more motivation.
You mentioned weaving. My understanding is there’s a phase of setting it up, but then after you've set the “code” in place, it's just sort of rote productivity. Have you found that to be helpful in being productive with textile art specifically?
I actually talked to my therapist about it when I learned to weave, because the first thing I made was blankets. It’s a process that's so novel to the rest of my work, as an illustrator, painter, embroiderer. There’s an instant, predictable access to a flow state or a meditative state, because all the decisions are compartmentalized into the first part — picking the pattern, deciding what yarn you're using, what colors, all that stuff. Once everything's on the loom, you just have to go. You just keep track of the pattern, doing this repetitive motion, back and forth, and making sure it's as consistent as you can. I realized, “Oh, what I experience in my other work is decision fatigue.”
It becomes more about how you're doing the thing. You're not making a decision about doing it, but about how you’re doing it, with what degree of consistency and care.
Yes. And it's a question of presence, right? What we were talking about before, the mind's eye going galaxy brain thinking about what that end product could be. All that stuff is important, it’s a working cog of creative process, but it also takes you out of the moment. So much of art practice is the ability to be present, just the nuts and bolts of writing the first sentence, sketching it out, feeling the paper, touching the yarn — this very mundane building block unit off which everything else is built. I think that sometimes that mind’s-eye state, almost like the god complex part of being a maker, can really alienate you from the actual making.
And part of the trick is maybe to set up the rails of the work, which weaving does by its nature in such a way that the virtual or astrally projected end point cannot get in the way, cannot spook you, can’t stop the train from running.
Parameters can be guide rails for production, can be something useful instead of distracting, can be liberating.
It's more of a North Star, a direction of travel for the train.
Yes — let’s set some things in stone, and leave the other stuff for next projects.
Speaking of systems on rails that can provide creative insight: tarot is a system that doesn’t require much decision making yet generates a creative output.
There's an invitation to sit and interpret in tarot, that kind of tricks you into introspection. Not unlike how starting a project is often just tricking yourself to sit down and be present, right? Like, I’m going to look through these books, collect these images… Pulling cards adds a similar element of chance, observation, conversation: what do you see? Does this lens apply? Does this resonate? I describe it often as a form of proto-therapy. There is a similar function, in terms of giving you frameworks, language, sounding boards with which to explore your internal landscape.
And a system in which futures for that landscape can emerge.
Like trying on masks, or outfits: does this fit? What am I taking away from this? It’s like a randomized story generator for your experience.
One of the examples you gave as method for tricking oneself was looking through different books.
What do you call that practice that people do with the Bible, where you let it fall open to a page? I’ll open five books, flip through, cover every surface with whatever is calling to me. So much of my work grows out of my relationship to text and literature, as with my translation zines.
What has been the focus of those zines?
They are my translations of classical Chinese poetry. I think there's something about translation that is observational and curatorial in a way. There are many paths in front of you as you look into the source text, and as you choose certain words, doors begin to close off, but the form emerges more clearly.
What were you translating specifically?
For example, this one poem by Li Qingzhao, a Song dynasty poet. A lot of her work dealt with grief, melancholy, and solitude, especially after the death of her husband. I'm not a formally trained translator, which is also what I love about self-publishing. I feel released from my urge to defer to institutional authority, and I feel that readers in turn implicitly understand that this is my spin on it as an individual maker.
Translation as an expression of self through the medium of other already existing writing.
Right, you're expressing a point of view.
And that, in a way, is what you're doing with the Tarot deck. How did you approach that?
The deck started an exercise in comparative journeying, these stories that exist everywhere across cultures. I specifically wanted to translate the Fool’s Journey, the metaphor for enlightenment embedded in the tarot’s major arcana, through the lens of Chinese mythology, Buddhist and Daoist iconography, organized by the narrative structure of the 16th century novel Journey to the West. It’s a Chinese literary classic, based on the Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang’s journey to retrieve Buddhist scriptures in their original Sanskrit from India, in order to translate them more accurately. The existing translations of his time amounted to this game of telephone that had occurred across great geographical and temporal distance, so he was basically a frustrated translator looking for primary source material.
It took him something like 16 years to go there and come back. So Journey to the West is the fantastical, allegorical take on that. We have these supernatural figures coming in, gods, deities, demons, among them the iconic folk hero figure of the Monkey King, the trickster figure who is the protagonist and namesake of my deck. So card 0, classically the Fool, here renamed Trickster, is Monkey at the beginning of their journey. And from there, card 1, the Magician is the Daoist mystic who is Monkey’s first teacher, and so on, in loose sequence, all the way to card 21, the World, representing Monkey’s final enlightenment.
That’s another kind of fool's journey — a fool’s errand maybe, because whatever is hidden within the scripture you probably don't need to go anywhere to get.
Right — we have revelation at home! There’s enlightenment in the pantry already!
This is your first book. Has it made you think about other books?
Totally. I think the seductive thing about having support in publishing is that I don't have to make it myself. When I take production off my plate, all that physical labor, I can really focus a little more on the project itself. And of course there’s the allure of a promised platform. I think part of the life cycle of art is to have some kind of audience interaction. The parameters might change across the type of art, but I think there generally is a desire for an interaction, for it to be perceived, maybe talked about in some way. So there's something very comforting in knowing this project will be seen and used far beyond my personal reach.
Jia Sung is an artist and educator. She is currently an adjunct professor at RISD, where she received her BFA in 2015. Her first book, Trickster’s Journey, was published by Hachette in 2023.