On unlearning the self-punitive model of making art

What have you been meditating on recently?

One of the ideas I’ve been meditating on lately is what does it mean to be colonized? In the inverse, what does it mean to decolonize, to reindigenize? I’ve only recently started grappling with those questions in wanting to connect more with my Okinawan side and thinking about the history of Okinawa being colonized by Japan and how the colonization of Okinawa relates to the colonization of other colonized people in other places in the world. Thinking energetically, what does colonization do to your spirit? In turn, how can we reclaim what was taken from us? Not in the sense of faithfully recreating what was in the past, but to claim our agency while also paving new patterns for the future.

What is your process for acquiring inspiration?

It’s a mix of receptivity as well as listening to my intuition. It’s improvising with the universe and then there may be a stray idea or suggestion. Then I follow that rabbit hole and see where I end up.

I love the idea of improvising with the universe. Have most of your creative projects come out of that play?

Yes, I think so. Most of my published books were not planned. A lot of my published books are the results of me making a web comic because I really wanted to excavate a certain feeling or making a zine because I wanted to delve more into my meditation practice. And then just very serendipitously, they ended up becoming books.

One example in particular is my book, Fashion Forecasts, which is about futuristic Asian American intergenerational fashion designs that’s also a little silly. That started as me wanting to make silly fashion designs out of boredom. And then that all accumulated serendipitously into being able to exhibit the artwork generated at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries building through the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, which then became a zine and an exhibit where my friend actually made these fashion designs come to life through costumes on mannequins, which eventually became a book. A lot of my artistic career was very unplanned; they came as a result of me wanting to put work out there based on my interests.

Do you have a strong intuition of what to say yes to, what to say no to? When do you say no to something?

I definitely have a strong intuition as far as what to say yes to, what to say no to. I am pretty committed to having a daily meditation practice, which expands your intuition the more you do it. I’ve also done a lot of therapy and self-help, so I’ve unpeeled the layers of people pleasing and unlearning the tendency to say yes to things and overfilling my plate.

Also I’ve done a lot of work as far as being more somatically attuned to my body. Listening somatically to when my body says yes and when my body says no. I generally follow that somatic intelligence of how my body feels when confronted with a choice. When something is a no, it’s like my body constricts or I feel flat and I don’t feel any nudge or curiosity, and so I know to not do the thing.

What does a yes feel like?

A yes can feel like different things. There is a sense of an opening, a feeling of ease, a feeling of excitement, but also sometimes it may feel intimidating. There may be that somatic gaslighting, like your lizard brain being like, “No, this is scary.” But there is this other layer of inner intelligence that says, “Well, let’s still explore this.” Ultimately it’s the sense of opening and wanting to move forward.

Fear and excitement can feel very similar somatically, but that’s when you have to investigate further. To your point, is it regressive or is it progressive? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Absolutely. But the more you practice exercising your discernment, it gets so much easier with time and practice and repetition.

I’m curious about your relationship with failure and how you internalize your lessons. Tell me about how you learn.

I feel like the only failure is not doing anything, not trying. Even if things don’t go as planned… I can’t think of anything in my creative life that would necessarily be categorized as failures. I see them all as experiences, experiments, and data points to then glean from for future experiences.

My friend wanted to know—she’s a Sagittarius—do you identify with being a Sagittarius?

Absolutely! The aspect of Sagittarius energy I have always related to the most is the love of freedom and autonomy and deep hatred of anything that takes away my freedom and autonomy and personal space.

The other stereotype of Sagittarius energy is that they’re very brash truth tellers. I was very shy and introverted and quiet and socially awkward as a kid. I didn’t relate to that as much but as I become more my own person, I relate to that brash Sagittarius energy. And of course, I love traveling, I love novelty, I get bored easily, I love big picture thinking over detail oriented thinking. I have that joyful, lucky optimism that’s associated with Sagittarius energy, and I feel like I do have a lot of abundance and luck in my life. I love being a Sagittarius and I love other Sagittariuses.

Tell me more about your recent obsession with Human Design.

Human Design is like astrology on steroids. My knowledge is pretty cursory; I know the most about my own archetype, the Manifestor. Manifestors, like the name implies, are all about channeling ideas and making them a reality. Whereas other archetypes, for example like Reflectors, are about holding space and reflecting other people’s energies in a container and helping people find themselves. Projectors, I get the impression that when they’re invited to do a task, that’s where they thrive. And Generators thrive in doing stuff constantly, keeping busy. The thing I relate with Manifestor energy is that we are capable of bringing ideas from the realm of ideas to bring them towards reality, but we don’t necessarily have to be the person that then does all the nitty-gritty of finalizing the thing into completion.

In a revolution, not everybody should be a leader. You also need planners and people who can feed everyone. So I love this idea of everything being collaborative. It eliminates this very common widespread notion of the artist as a solo genius. Tell me about your relationship with collaboration.

I’m glad you brought up the myth of the solo isolated artist because I definitely remember believing in that when I was younger and also when I was an undergrad at art school. In later years, I was able to unlearn that. Even though on paper it seems like I’m working alone a lot, I’m still in collaboration. For example, if I want to sell my zines in public spaces, I’m collaborating with the independent bookstores I like to distribute my work. If I publish a book, then I’m collaborating with the publisher, my literary agent, and then that whole ecosystem of booksellers and bookstores who bring my book to other people.

I’ve definitely collaborated with friends on facilitating workshops together, as well as co-authoring a zine or co-hosting events. I am very picky about who I collaborate with. It comes down to, again, that somatic knowing of, “Okay, this person vibes with me. We’re on resonant frequencies and we understand each other.” When you have that baseline, everything else falls into place pretty quickly.

What is your relationship with wellness? How do you define wellness in your day-to-day?

Wellness for myself these days is embodying an ongoing sense of wholeness and excitement. It’s whatever contributes to that feeling of wholeness and also excitement to live your life. Depending on what you’re going through in your life, that can mean different things. I remember a time in my post-college adulthood feeling like I didn’t have a close network of friends. So at the time my wholeness was finding and cultivating really good friendships.

Most recently, I turned 40, so I’ve been thinking a lot about proactively being really healthy in a way that is also sustainable and not self-punitive. Making an effort to cook healthy meals for myself, being physically active, prioritizing sleep, and being protective of my energy.

It’s also really important to recognize the greater societal structures that we are in, especially the oppressive structures. Because with mainstream wellness, it falls into the trap of hyperindividualism and throwing money at a problem to feel better about yourself. A more holistic view of wellness has to include a critical analysis of the oppressive systems and the historical factors that made these oppressive systems possible and how supremacy culture is the backbone of so many beauty standards and insidiously shows up in conventional expectations and aspirations of wellness.

There’s this Malcolm X quote: “When ‘I’ is replaced by ‘we,’ even illness becomes wellness.” I feel like modern wellness is so divorced from this sense of community wellness and I love what you said about how it’s not about restriction. You teach a webinar about discipline as pleasure—discipline as something that’s not restrictive, but rather pleasurable. What is your relationship and philosophy around discipline?

I wanted to unlearn toxic ideas around discipline, especially as it pertains to creative practice, because many of us associate discipline with restriction, self-punishment–forcing yourself into working towards a “better version of yourself.” I tried doing discipline with those mindsets and it did temporarily work in the sense that I did generate a lot of art and accomplish impressive things, but it wasn’t sustainable in the sense that I was constantly in the state of feeling that I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t working hard enough. There was always this horizon I was chasing rather than acknowledging and celebrating where I was in the present. And so I really wanted to reframe the idea of discipline, not just in creative practice, but in general.

We also have childhood associations with discipline. And as a child, you likely experience discipline as a form of punishment, restriction, your freedom, and autonomy being taken away, you being forced to do something that you didn’t want to do. There are other people who experience the inverse of that where they had no discipline or structure in childhood, so then they grow up into adults and they have no idea what it means to give yourself discipline and structure in a way that isn’t self-punitive or restrictive.

I aim to reframe discipline as self-love, something that you give to yourself because you desire to prioritize something that is important to you, whether that is creative practice or having more time to do the hobbies that you love, or to spend more time with loved ones, or to treat your body really well because you really value your body.

The other is to reframe discipline as devotion. What does it mean to be devoted to your creative practice? That completely changes the energetic frequency of whatever activity it is that you’re doing. When you replace discipline with devotion, it becomes an ongoing journey, a curiosity, a relationship. The other thing that really helps me in reframing discipline as it pertains to creative practice is that ultimately it’s about deepening your relationship to yourself, as well as your creative practice, as well as the art that you are generating.

So when I think of discipline as a relational model, then it’s not so much, “How can I work harder?” The question then becomes, “How can I connect more deeply with myself? How can I connect more deeply with my creative practice? How can I show up better in this relationship that is important to me?”

It inevitably will make your art stronger as well because you are connecting deeper with those parts of yourself. Have you surprised yourself with the creative things that have come out of this practice?

Unlearning the self-punitive model of making art also comes with getting older. I’m so much less attached to proving myself to an external barometer. I’ve been able to reclaim the actual fun of being creative. I am pleasantly surprised by how much I was able to release these more egoic attachments to making art.

It’s not about proving I have the right to be an artist. It’s more this desire to generate work I desire to share with other people. It’s not so much begging people to give me validation and proof that I’m allowed to be an artist. It’s now coming from a much more generative place where I’m thinking more, “What do I desire to share with the collective and how can I think, be of service to that?” What is that intersection of my passions, interests, curiosities—the ideas and principles and paradigms I glean from to alchemize in a way that is then transmitted to the collective?