Jia Sung is a Singaporean Chinese artist and art educator, born in Minnesota, raised in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn.  She is currently an art director at Guernica, and the inaugural Teaching Artist in Residence at the Museum of Chinese in America. Since graduating from RISD in 2015, her work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, the Poetry Foundation, TED Talks, Lenny Letter, Nautilus, and exhibited at La Mama Galleria, the Whitney Houston Biennial, the RISD Museum, and Wook + Flavio Gallery. 

My current work engages the body as a conduit for questions about cultural, postcolonial, and femme identity, using images of bestial women – animal/human hybrids – to speak to the performative nature of selfhood and of femininity. In recent paintings I explore the Chinese epic Journey to the West, subverting its Confucian patriarchal roots by feminizing the characters. Informed by experiences of transplantation and coming of age in the west, these paintings seek to transform a story about male ascension to sainthood through the shunning, maiming, and killing of women, into a narrative of sisterhood and body-centered strife.