On seeing everything as art

You’re a fifth-generation San Franciscan and a Chinese and Japanese American. How does your identity shape the work you produce as an artist? Is there any separation between the art and the artist? What drives you to make art?

I’m about to sound like an art teacher: everyone’s an artist. Life is art. Everything we create is art. But I really do feel that even just our choices, our decisions, the way we look at the world, the way we interact with one another are forms of art in some way. Growing up as a fifth-generation San Franciscan with deep roots in San Francisco and deep roots in California, I have always felt this deeper inner body of knowing—a deeper connection to self, but also to others, and to existence, and to the place that not only raised me but raised my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents. The place that has been stewarded by generations of the Ohlone and Ramaytush-Ohlone ancestors.

I’ve always had this deep fascination with walking in San Francisco and feeling that I am in a portal, like timeline jumping. I would walk through the city as a kid and my grandma would be like, “Eryn, this is where we used to go for really good pork chops, the Pork Chop House. They were really cheap, $2.75 a plate.” And then I’d be imagining my grandma there, imagining my mom there, and then just feeling this deep connection to the place and people.

My identity is the lens through which I see the world, and also the lens through which so many others probably see me. I feel like my identity is how I get to express myself. It’s also me trying to figure things out and alchemize these pasts that I didn’t have any words or visuals or pictures for. Audre Lorde says, “Name the nameless.” I felt all these unsung songs, these deep hymns and feelings. Creating and expressing was a way for me to dig all of these things up and to make them more tangible. I’m so deeply intertwined. The art and the artist are one and the same.

You’re predominantly a collage artist. You pull from a vast personal collection of vintage magazine clippings and handmade Japanese paper, amongst other materials. What is the value of repurposing found and archival materials?

Collage allows me to look at the collective memory. I love going through these magazines and publications that were a part of mass media during my parents’, my grandparents’, my great-grandparents’ time. It’s like understanding the hegemony of the time. You see these large cultural currents that were the exact currents and discourses my ancestors were traversing and navigating, but also actively questioning. I feel a lot of those discourses throughout my body. I feel those lineages of generational trauma through the ways in which those discourses still play out today. Collage and the act of going through papers and touching the ephemera and looking at it, it’s so tactile. I just fucking love that. This is the shit that people were being inundated with at the time.

Like racist shit?

Yeah, very racist shit. It’s just a trip because these articles and prints were very supremacist and very patriarchal. Collage allows me to literally tear shit out and rip it apart and crumble it and then create something totally new and different. The act of cutting things up, dissecting—it’s almost turning hegemony on its head. What did these things actually mean? What brings me joy and beauty from looking at it? I think a lot of it also has to do with de-contextualizing and reimagining. There’s a magical element, but there’s also a deep, nostalgic element to everything I do.

My mom is a musician. My parents met at the height of 1969 at a school dance. They’re high school sweethearts. When they met, my mom was in a daisy chain and her own homemade dress, maybe tripping on acid. When my parents tell me these stories, I already have these visuals and these feelings, and I’m able to transcribe them and reconfigure them. It’s satisfying. There’s a deep pleasure that comes from all of it.

I would love to hear a little more about your creative process.

When I was living in Japan, I really felt the gender dynamics, the sexual and patriarchal trauma. I know the queens that came before me have dealt with so much shit. All the femmes that I grew up with, all the aunties, my mom, my grandma—fierce-ass warrior femmes. I’ve always felt this lack of safety in my body, whether in America or in Japan or anywhere. So I found all these old 1950s publications with “demure” Asian American women and took them out of these contexts, reimagining them as these revered figures who are also complicated and yet powerful in their bodies. I’m so deeply nostalgic for San Francisco, the village that raised me and that is so at risk. So I include those pieces of Frisco in the collage. Whether that’s through the cars that I grew up seeing, that my parents and my grandparents used to drive; or the foods that we all grew up with; or the streets we were raised on. I have certain threads and motifs that I always put in all my work.

I am so obsessive about cutting little things. I literally just take stacks of magazines, newspapers, ephemera that I find at estate sales, like at the Japanese American Buddhist temple garage sales where everyone’s just giving away their shit. I have days where I just cut things. I organize them because I’m a Capricorn. And I cut big pieces and really small ones. I have those Altoid mini cans [for storage]. And then I put things together. I always start with the big and then go small.

I revisit things a lot. Oftentimes when I’m creating something through collage, I know that I may not love the first few sketches, but I try to just keep going. I try to just remember creativity is like a muscle. Sometimes you make some shit things.

What do you do when you feel like something is not working?

It’s really hard to just stop. Sometimes I let go and step away and do other shit. I put time limits on myself because I’m incredibly obsessive. I like to go for a walk or listen to music or get really, really high and just see what happens.

How does ancestral wisdom guide your creative practice?

I’m one of those people that needed a manual or a book to tell me how the fuck to make it in this world. But instead I have been given morsels from all my family members, all the elders in my life, and even from nature and interactions with the universe. I’ve been given these little grains, these little snacks, and now it’s my job to synthesize them. It’s my job to take these threads from all these different records—places that I’ve been to, people that I’ve met—and quilt them all together. My collage art and my art process is me synthesizing this ancestral wisdom that I feel and that I’ve been collecting over time. I see myself as a legacy worker. I feel so lucky to be doing this legacy work and to be a part of this continuum of care, abundance, and infinite possibility. Now that I have all my niblings—my eight nieces and nephews—it’s never been about me. It’s always been about the “we.” I exist in this village.

You were born and raised in San Francisco and live in Oakland now, though you also lived in France and Japan. Due to the tech industry, COVID, and other things, San Francisco looks different from the city you were raised in. From a local’s perspective, how has it changed?

First of all, I needed to fucking leave San Francisco because I was just popping off on everyone in my 20s. I was like, “This place is awful.” But I don’t want to live in this doom loop anymore. What I see now is the deterioration and the active dismantling of the intergenerational village, of the poly-cultural village. The village is upheld by the mom and pop stores that have been there for a while, the pillars of the community. I firmly believe that people are places, and that places are people. When you don’t have the people, you don’t have the place. The people in the community that create that place are actively being pushed out. It happens so quickly in San Francisco because there is a tremendous amount of wealth here.

In addition to making art, you are a community organizer. I would love to hear about how one informs the other. What is the intersection between community organizing and art making? How do these two things coexist?

One of my strengths is connecting with people. How can I continue to be a steward of the village? I work for this 105-year-old Black-led institution that has been embedded in the Fillmore and has a really deep history with Japantown. My preschool is in that building. When Japanese Americans were incarcerated, this community center held on to everyone’s stuff and helped people find housing when they came back from the camps.

I haven’t been doing a lot of collage lately, but my current work, my 9-to-5 work, is very much in alignment with my principles and my values and my art. I’m dedicating a lot of time in life to creating an intergenerational village: one that is culturally responsive, one that is dignified, one where people want to be there, one where joy is centralized. How do we ensure that all of these OGs like Fillmore Black Frisconians can age with utmost dignity and joy, in community, in the place that they helped steward and create?

Your day job feels like it’s a human tapestry, like a collage in physical form.

That’s what I hope. I want all the babies to remember that they exist in this beautiful collective ecosystem with rich histories, with incredible stories, and people that are just pure love.

How have you maintained your art practice for over a decade? I know you have taken breaks and picked up other interests along the way, like baking. What do you think an artistic life looks like?

I’ve taken many capitalist and anti-capitalist sabbaticals, aka my whole time in fucking France, where I had all these odd jobs and was just scrounging around for money. Japan was my art sabbatical. I literally can’t help but think that every choice and everything that I do is an artistic practice. For example, I like saying hi to everyone on the street. I like smiling at people. I love doing really mundane things. I love walking outside. Have you ever read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki? The beauty is in the shadows. I love looking at the way light hits the walls, and the changing of the day. I think a lot of living an artistic life is just being incredibly present. To exist: what a fucking miracle. What are the odds that we’re all here, that we’re all here together, in this skin and with all these birds and these trees and everything? An artistic life also looks like taking my time, really making sure that in every moment I carve out corners and crevices of joy and of stillness and awe. Awe is really important to me.

What inspires you?

Walking in early morning light through Chinatown or on Clement Street and seeing the shadows hit the mounds of oranges on display. Seeing the way the sun shines through the gates throughout the Richmond District and throughout the Mission. Jenny Odell’s books really inspire me, especially How to Do Nothing. There is just so much in the seemingly mundane. Going to the Tilden Park Botanical Gardens, because it’s fucking free. Smelling fresh earth. Redwoods post-rain. Watching babies and kids running the streets—they make me remember who I’m fighting for and what we have to fight for. Whale watching in April or May off of Fort Funston gives me all the good feels. Berkeley farmers markets. The literal fruits of people’s labor. I love looking at people’s grocery lists, seeing the cursive. They tell you so much about a person and what stage they are at in life. That’s their everyday practice, right? What a gorgeous art form, just their printed cursive and their little notes. The Museum of the African Diaspora curator Key Jo Lee really inspires me. San Francisco is not worthy. Octavia Butler. LaRussell. Risographs. Betye Saar.

Things have been bleak in the world lately (maybe always?) and it’s been a particularly rough start to the year in California with the devastating wildfires. What brings you hope these days?

My imagination. Everyone’s imagination. The first thing to be colonized is our imagination. They don’t want us to dream. They don’t want us to have hope. They don’t want us to imagine a new world, but we have no choice but to imagine a better world. I love the quantum universe. These new worlds exist. We have no idea why we’re here, why our skin grows back when it gets cut, but we’re all miraculously here. We do some really fucked up things together. But the fact that we’re here, and the fact of the movements that have come before us, and the love that has been transmitted before us… that shit really helps.