Artist Statement/ Biography

Jia Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert parameters set around the humanity of women, queer people, and those considered ‘other.’ As a Singaporean Chinese queer woman born in Minnesota, raised in Singapore, and now based in Brooklyn, her experiences of transplantation and coming-of-age in the west have pushed her to question what it means to reconnect to inherited stories without reenacting dynamics of fetishization and orientalism. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, she decenters the cisheteronormative values embedded within these archives by reinterpreting them through a queer feminist lens. Her recent work spans paintings, zines & artist books, poetry, and tapestries incorporating embroidery and beadwork — meditative fragments encrusted on a surface that serve as love letters to handcrafts and feminized labor.

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Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, bred in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn, and received a BFA from RISD in 2015. Her work spans paintings, zines & artist books, poetry, and tapestries, and uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert the archive through a queer feminist lens. She was a 2018-2019 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and is currently an adjunct professor at RISD. Her paintings and artist books have been exhibited across North America, including the Knockdown Center, RISD Museum, Wave Hill, EFA Project Space, Lincoln Center, Yale University, and MOMA PS1. She has taught at organizations like the AC Institute, Abrons Arts Center, Children’s Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Chinese in America.