LUNAR NEW YEAR: BEHIND THE COLLAB, PART II
Meet the second artist behind our LNY24 collection! Collaborating with other members of our community is one of the most inspiring things we do as a brand. We find so much power in coming together with other AAPI creatives, and we couldn’t be more excited about the exclusive pieces we’ve created in this partnership.
Meet Jia Sung
Tell us a little bit about yourself!
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 work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, Emergence Magazine, Astra Magazine, the Poetry Foundation, and the Asian American Writers Workshop, and collected by institutions including the Met, SFMOMA, and the Special Collections at Yale, SAIC, and RISD. She is the author of Trickster's Journey, a tarot deck and guidebook, published with Running Press in 2023. She has taught workshops with organizations like the Hudson River Museum, MoMA and NYU. She was a 2018-2019 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and was an adjunct professor at RISD, where she received her BFA in 2015.
Who are you, what drives you, what do you love to create?
I was raised in Singapore and spent my adult life here in the US, and so my viewpoint as a maker is deeply syncretic and culture-crossing. I see my practice as reinvented cosmology, pieced together from threads of inherited story and autobiographical fragments. I love creating work that feels evocative and full of lore — even if the references aren’t always legible, ideally there is a sense of narrative and continuity that comes through.
How did you come up with your ideas for this collab?
A lot of my personal lexicon pulls from art history, folklore, mythology — I wanted to bring a sense of that grounding in living traditions into our collaboration. Symbology as a form of protection and manifestation has always fascinated me. Clothing in particular embodies this desire to harness the symbolic power of animal and plant life into portable talismans. For our Lunar New Year collection, I was thinking of the dragon’s use as a recurring motif in historical clothing such as Chinese imperial robes, denoting status, power, and protection. There was such an easy flow to ideating and collaborating with Daisy and Jane, I think due to our shared interest in bringing a subversive, contemporary bite to traditional methods and motifs!
What is your favorite lunar new year tradition? What is something you wish people knew about your work or culture?
Honestly I think it’s the feasting! Lately I’ve been thinking about the role of presence in creating intimacy. Coming together to share space and food is such a shared language of bonding, and seasonal celebrations like Lunar New Year are among the few times of the year where we put a lot of intention and care into gathering.