Jia Sung

Jia Sung is a Singaporean Chinese artist and educator whose practice spans painting, artist books, textiles, and printmaking. 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 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. Her work is held in the collections of the The Met, SFMoMA, the Special Collections at Yale University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Rhode Island School of Design, among many others. Her work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, Emergence Magazine, Astra Magazine, Poetry Foundation, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She has taught workshops with organizations such as the Hudson River Museum, MoMA, and NYU. She was a 2018-9 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and is currently an adjunct professor at RISD, where she received her BFA in 2015.