Jia Sung is the featured artist for the “On Girlhood” Community Anthology. Below is her artist statement, which provides context for the artwork she created for the anthology. You will find crops of the featured artwork on each of the published pieces in the anthology.
Reading over editors K-Ming and Hairol’s vision for “On Girlhood”, I was drawn towards somehow representing the strangeness, violence, and untidy metamorphosis that is so often pruned out of popular portrayals of girlhood.
My piece wraps all the dissociative, disembodied echoes that the idea of girlhood stirs up for me into the figure of the krasue, the Thai name for a spirit of Southeast Asian folklore who spends her waking hours as a normal woman and wanders the night as a floating head trailed by a messy snarl of intestines, savaging livestock, befouling her neighbours’ sheets with blood and shit, undoing the domestic order she presumably participates in by day. The performance of doubled life ties her to trickster lore; like the fox spirit, she is bound firmly to the domestic realm, an alien in disguise gaining access to the interior spaces of everyday human life.
I had been ruminating on this image of a floating, weightless woman since attending a residency in Thailand this past summer where I made almost no art but lay on the mattress all month reading about Thai spirits and legends; over time this melded with fragments of my personal lexicon. Here, the krasue’s transformation is a profane mirror of the Ascension of Christ, a common subject in Christian art: she leaves her body behind surrounded by blood and adoring masses. The posture of her discarded body is a nod to Yorozu Tetsugoro’s Nude Beauty (1912), an irreverent take on the reclining nude response to the Orientalizing gaze of Post-Impressionism.
In my practice, I work across the disciplines of painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, murals, writing, and translation, pulling on motifs from Chinese mythology, Buddhist iconography, and the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert the archive. My approach draws from the Chinese zhiguai tradition, the genre of ‘strange tales’ that 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 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.
The original piece is a stone lithograph print, grained, prepared, and printed with the support and troubleshooting of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking workshop community.
To see the rest of the featured artwork, browse through the published pieces here.
