Embracing Joy

Embracing Joy is a series of joyful vignettes — snippets from life of people I love, places I love, memories that make me smile.

My art practice has long been rooted in trauma: both personal traumas – familial abuse, eating disorders, sexual assault, mental illness – as well as collective ones – racism, sexism, environmental injustice. I’ve created painting after painting decrying anti-Asian violence, the retrenchment of women’s rights, the wanton destruction of the natural world. I’ve written story after story about how my mother abused me, how I struggled with depression, how I felt alienated from my heritage. Creating from this place of grief and indignation was no doubt galvanizing, but it was also extremely emotionally taxing. The process of painting these pieces often became laborious and painful, like each time I put brush to canvas, I was carving into my own flesh.

Lately, I’ve been shifting in direction. I want to think beyond what I’m resisting, opposing, fighting against, and instead consider what I actively want to embrace. I want to make work not about what I’m running from, but what I’m moving toward. I want to turn away from “no” and instead seek the “yes.” This migration toward the positive and affirmative, to me, constitutes a small action in a larger project of worldbuilding and envisioning liberated futures. As Ruha Benjamin writes, “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”

I am interested in making paintings that capture moments of joy, while also feeling viscerally joyful to create. I want to paint joy because there’s more than enough hardship to go around. Amidst such vast suffering in the world, and with my own struggles with physical and mental illness, it has been the little pockets of joy that propel me from one day to the next. Those moments of snorting laughter or tranquil ease. Those moments of togetherness and enoughness. Those moments when my chest feels tight from my heart straining to burst against it.

Joy is not frivolous, it is not unserious – it is a practice of survival. Joy is what emerges from having lost and having something to lose. Joy is what empowers us to resist the injustices of the present world, and to open our imaginations to new possibilities. Joy is what binds us together.