EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Jia Sung
Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, raised in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn. Her practice spans disciplines, painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, murals, writing, and translation. Inspired by Chinese historical textiles and traditions of feminized labor, her recent work combines tapestry, embroidery, and beadwork with painting. 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, imbuing them with an eroticism that pushes back at the bowdlerization of inherited stories.
Her approach pulls from that of the Chinese zhiguai tradition, the genre of ‘strange tales’, untranslatable through the western conception of horror, where the supernatural, the monstrous and the spiritual, seep into the tidy confines of ordinary existence and smear at the boundaries of our reality. Hybrid figures, part-human, part-animal, playact domestic and social roles with each other, make halfhearted attempts at assimilation, reverse roles and swap parts. Sung imbues these monstrous hybrids with an eroticism that pushes back at the pincer attack of internal, Confucian and external, Orientalist efforts in bowdlerizing the Chinese diasporic canon of inherited stories.
