On finding joy in physicality

Happy Lunar New Year! How has your year been?

I lost my job last January. But it’s funny, I had been thinking about leaving that job literally the beginning of that month. I was finally ready to pursue freelance and tattooing more and dive into investing in myself and my art more, because I was able to grow following, or my art account, a lot over the last three years. In and out of tech and full-time jobs, jumping in and out of tattooing part-time, doing freelance gigs part-time—it felt like my brain was splitting. It felt like I was doing a disservice to my art to not do it full time.

I wasn’t going to leave [my job] until the spring because I had just come out of the holiday season. I had my birthday in the second week of January. At my birthday party, I remember having this moment… I was pretty drunk, but I felt like, “This year is going to change a lot for me. I don’t know what the fuck is going to happen, but I feel like my life is going to look super different in a year.” Two weeks later I got laid off and I was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to jump into freelance earlier than I expected.”

I was also moving at the time. My partner and I were living together for seven years and we decided to move apart for our own personal relationship growth. It’s been the best decision ever. Neither of us have lived alone before. We’re still together but it was a huge [task of] uncoupling, detangling all of our personal items. It was a lot of change at once. Then I went to Asia last September; I hadn’t been home in eight years. That also fundamentally changed how I felt about my identity. My grandpa passed during that trip.

Overall, even though the whole year was very chaotic, I would say that it’s been my best year yet in terms of what I’ve been able to create. I was right about the fact that if I just invested my full ass into making and thinking deeply about my artwork, it would pay back tenfold. It’s been nothing but amazing to be able to just do whatever I want.

Not having one foot in a creative career and one foot in a more corporate career, you have the mind space cleared to return to your roots of why you started your creative practice.

Definitely. Because I’ve had more clarity on myself, I’ve had a lot more clarity on my artwork or what I want to be doing with it. And the ideas come flowing in a lot easier than they were. I was dealing with some major burnout in 2022 and 2023. That was the worst period creatively for me. I feel like I finally came out the other end of it. People don’t know, but burnout can last years.

The weight of being burned out and the account growth being very quick… I buckled under that pressure. Learning to create under many eyes was hard. Before I was such a small account, like 800 followers, and I would just post whatever the fuck. I feel like I can’t do that anymore. At certain points I was like, “People have expectations for what Gentle Oriental is going to post.” I feel like I still work through that every day.

Pressure under perception is huge and you’ve been really open about that on your social media—your love-hate relationship with Instagram and the ways the algorithms have shifted.

Oh, yeah. I have written about that a few times. I think [Instagram] is dying right now. I also think people are really burnt out by social media. I know more people than not now who are like, “ I haven’t checked my Instagram in a few days.” Then that’s stressful for artists who like to thrive on social media. If the people are not on social media anymore, then what do we do? That’s the problem that I’m dealing with right now. My Substack is always better. I think people are more reliably checking email. I feel like that’s always been a very stable method of communication and digesting information at a healthy distance.

I don’t really have hopes anymore for things to go viral on Instagram the way it used to for me. I do feel like there’s over-saturation in the market right now. When I first started posting, there was this Asian American art renaissance happening. It was really cool. There was so much newness. I don’t think people are tired of artists or art or any of it at face value, I think they’re just probably tired of the way that it’s being consumed and the way they’re being forced to consume it.

I still have pockets of joy when I run into people in real life who are like, “Oh, I love your art.” That means a lot more to me than seeing 100 likes on a post… So this year I’m optimizing for what I can do to meet people in real life or have my work appear in physical locations instead of always being confined to the ‘gram. Maybe there’s a move back to traditional media in terms of showing art. I’m trying to make more prints this year. Objects would help me feel like my art is more tethered to this world [rather] than just being on a screen. Tattooing has also always helped me feel that way, because it’s physically tethered.

I’m trying to push myself to go to events and be not afraid of meeting people. I know people are out there trying to host things. We all say we want community and then we’re too baby to leave the house. I just need to deal with that. Just go to the thing.

Especially in a city like New York, everyone is so busy. Community for me over the past few years has been defined as showing your face as often as you can, just going and going until your absence is noticeable when you’re not there. But that’s very high effort.

Yeah, it is super high effort. I’m trying to meet more people for sure, but that’s so unquantifiable. I try to go for coffee with randos from Instagram more often these days. I feel like when I was really burnt out, I was getting a lot of requests like that, and I would be [say] no… When you’re really burnt out, it’s easy to feel that way because you barely have enough energy for yourself.

You were saying your burnout lasted a few years. What was your process of getting out of it? Was it conscious or was it just time?

It was time. It was time and it was unconscious… There was a period where I just didn’t have any idea what to make. I didn’t even know what to draw for flash. I was feeling so jaded. I don’t even know how to explain how depressed I was about my art. I was just like, “Does this matter? Is this anything?” It was hitting a rock and trying to chisel out something recognizable.

I think also for artists, if you’re personally going through a lot in your own life, it can get really in the way. I think there’s two ways: one way is you can channel that pain or difficulty into your art. Another way is if your art is so much a part of you that you feel like you having issues is making your art have issues. It’s hard being an artist, man. It’s a lot of working through your own stuff so that you can also work through your art. It’s so personally informed, especially my art. Anyone who is making very identity-based art, if you’re having an identity crisis, your art is going to be a little fucked for a little bit.

If I had one message for any artist going through burnout, it’s that you will get through it. There will be a day that comes when creating doesn’t feel so difficult anymore. I would say that I’m at that place now.

Would you say that it was a palpable shift? Or was it just like, one day you woke up and didn’t feel that way anymore?

[It happened over] a few months, I think. It was probably during 2024 while I was getting out of my job… When I was in the worst of my burnout, I would dissociate completely from my art. I would try to draw something and be like, “Who’s drawing this right now? I’m not drawing this right now. I don’t even know what this is.” It was just the weirdest feeling. Me and my art were very far apart during that period of burnout, and slowly they shift back together until they’re one cohesive blob. So now we’ve re-coupled.

That makes a lot of sense. At that point you had already built up a brand, so you knew “This is what Gentle Oriental would make,” but then you felt so detached from it.

Yeah, maybe it was that. And then I realized towards the end of it, “Gentle Oriental is just going to make whatever the fuck I want.” People will like it as long as I’m being more genuine to myself. I do find that the most genuine artifacts that I’ve made are the stuff that people gravitate towards the most. I can usually feel when something’s going to be good while I’m trying it or when I’m drawing a thing and I’m finishing it; there’s this euphoria that happens at the end of a piece where I finish it and I look at it and I’m like… I’m not religious, but in the Bible, when they say “God looked at his creations and said, ‘This is good’“—I feel that way. [It’s] that feeling where you’re like, “Yeah, I kind of cooked.”

God popped off when he made humans.

Exactly. He was like, “Damn I did that.”