Jason Phu

I haven’t had much time to reflect on being an artist since I started; this could be a good thing and a bad thing. I never had a realisation I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to do engineering but didn’t have the marks, and my high school art teacher convinced me to pursue fine arts. I guess I’ve just been doing it ever since. I tailor my medium to whatever project I’m working on, so I learnt or collaborated on different mediums instead of trying to dictate how things were going to play out. Curiosity for new mediums and technologies also plays a part.

It’s probably a lot more practical than conceptual. I went and lived in Chongqing (China) to learn calligraphy, but I ended up not making much work and just living there for two years. That influenced me more as a person rather than an artist. My mum’s family lives in Beijing, so my residencies there were more family-orientated – lots of eating, drinking and sitting around chewing the fat. My residencies in Thailand were to make etchings and lithographs. I go there a couple of times a year to make stuff.

The title refers to a few different things. Sun Wukong (Monkey King), one of the protagonists of Journey to the West (16th Century), was imprisoned under a stone mountain by Buddha for causing mischief. The characters in that book along with the bestiary Classic of the Mountains and Seas (4th Century) informed a lot of the figures in the paintings. I also drew from the common idiom, ‘Live under a rock’, as a way to reflect the new era of ignorance that I was born into and that I am a part of.
I think my updated versions of these characters help me explain my identity – bringing thousand-year-old beings into the present, you would expect them to be confused. But at the same time, their stories are still relevant. That is the juxtaposition of the diaspora identity: things can feel right in spirit but the words and context don’t match up. Of course, that is a constant as long as there is movement and migration. It is difficult to capture but I guess that’s where art can succeed where other experiences don’t.

Humour for me is a bit of a cheap trick. It is an effective way for me to communicate because it’s an easy way around other people’s barriers. I was always a bit of a class clown in high school, so it was my immature way of communicating, but now it’s become how I communicate as an adult. On a different note, Chan Buddhism, which influences a lot of my life and art, uses absurdity (and humour) as a way to step into enlightenment. A bit of silliness can go a long way in shifting people’s perspective.

Sometimes, I am annoyed by how many songs are about love and those feelings, but they are popular for a reason. We yearn to connect with these emotions but are left unfulfilled by reasoning. I think reasoning is an important one half, but we need that other half, the opposite of reason. I hope that my paintings contribute to that other half in a positive way. I feel like sometimes, my paintings are just pop songs about love, nostalgia, depression, albeit they would be weird love songs. But to be honest, if you actually stopped and listened to song lyrics, they are generally pretty weird. Maybe in actually answering your question, the serious and the humour go hand in hand; serious issues often have a dark comedic element and humour often has serious undertones.

In the same way everyday people caught in this divide get on with life,  I do it in my art. That’s a bit of an easy answer, but I try to keep it at the core of my work. Partly, it is the nostalgia of a culture I will never fully understand, but it is realising that no one really understands it wherever the roots lie. And that as a living person, I grow my own culture within myself. Of course, I am influenced by my histories, context and upbringing, but I am relevant as long as I keep reflecting and learning. My inspiration is my parents, who came to Australia with not much and have never complained a day in their life. They have weathered everything that has been thrown at them, things that would have broken me a thousand times over.

I think there are huge problems in Australia in regards to race. There is a casualisation of racism and racist policy that has not allowed us as a country to face the problems. In 2018, I was commissioned by the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to do a show, The Burrangong Affray, exploring the Lambing Flat Riots – anti-Chinese race riots that occurred in New South Wales in 1860-1861. It is considered to be the precursor to the White Australia policy and still has repercussions in our society. Sometimes, people want to make a distinction between political art and non-political art as if political art is a gimmick. Whereas I think most art is inherently political for existing right now. That isn’t to say, I think most of it is overtly political or a political statement, I just think that whether we like it or not, the lives we live are shaped by politics and our art is inevitably a reflection of that. 

I don’t consider myself to be particularly spiritual; I like to think I’m a very practical person. But also, I think good religion is practical. I am more interested in the poetics of spirituality, the beauty that informs the movements in our daily life rather than literal godly activities. Although I don’t mind the mischiefs of weird dragon demi-gods or lost demons.

I am currently working on a furniture commission for a university and a book of poetry due for release 2020. And then, I will be doing a residency at Animal Logic, the animation studio. After that, I will be working with some classical string musicians on a video work for a show early next year.