Artist Decoded By Yoshino

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 refus