Why is James Jean on Xiaohongshu?

hey welcome in oh welcome to my welcome to this okay welcome to my studio or maybe star wars hi i'm james james welcome to my studio okay okay [Music] my name is james jean i'm an artist in los angeles and i'm a painter sculptor i started out as a baby in in taiwan and then i moved to new jersey when i was three years old so basically the studio um used to be a frank gehry home from 1976 i took it over 2015 and completely renovated it and basically the house was originally designed as an art gallery and so when i saw it it was the perfect i think arrangement for my studio because it was just a big white box and there's a huge skylight a lot of daylight and yeah this is where i paint um i love working from home because i don't need to commute anywhere and it's great to be close to the family even though of course it always presents difficulties but i think you know that friction ends up creating a lot of interesting i pretty much work all the time like 24 7. so yeah there's no better place to be than these are my my painting carts with all my colors i don't need to do a lot of mixing we have so many different options available so basically for each painting we i'll do a color study on the computer and then we'll match all the colors by hand so these are about i would say halfway halfway done so was that too like uh in depth or do you want to make it more you want to be okay okay yeah i don't know if i was like answering like other questions sure sorry so i grew up in new jersey around us there weren't too many other asians so i was always trying my best to fit in as a as an immigrant and encouraged to to blend in and speak english and so because i didn't feel like i i fit in i sort of escaped into my drawings and this piece is called flood so this features a character i call the descendant and the descendant is a recurrent character in my work he's someone that is kind of floating between cultures usually i have them depicted like upside down a plane of glass or a mirror so the descendant isn't meant to you know it's kind of representative of me in a way where his uh identity or his cultural ties are very um you know unsettled and he's kind of just just caught between between things and also the the idea that he's called a descendant kind of referencing like my son in a way too so as far as james goes i guess they just liked um my parents really liked the uh alliteration so like the the j and the j they liked but also james at the time was really popular um so they were in my elementary school they were actually there were two other chinese boys it was three total including me and we were all named james that was that was really kind of funny but also a little uncomfortable because we all wore glasses we all had the same character and we all had the same name james so that was a little disturbing the other classmates would just see us as like oh that's what chinese people are like you know but yeah it's kind of been kind of weird oh you want me so come down here oh yeah are you trying to come down i think he wants to come down go you're free okay so this is miso he's a rescue from uh from skid row we got him when he was about a year and a half old [Music] we just turn this into a dog video we'll get more views i've always struggled a lot with being able to connect with my chinese side especially because i'm pretty much monolingual at this point you know being asian american it's it's i think really important to kind of you know connect to that history even my earlier work you can see how there's a lot of eastern influences from like chinese silk squirrel paintings and you know now that my work has you know reached a global audience i i do want to connect with with china more more directly and and to share my work there so this is my secondary studio where i'm working on some larger paintings at the moment yeah so a lot of times i like to work on my paintings flat there's a lot of water involved and spraying and splashing yeah so get these really interesting effects these are still in its uh you know kind of middle phase yeah here we have three people uh preparing kimchi and i'm a big fan of kimchi you know the lettuce leaves kind of referencing the lettuce headed characters that appear in my work but the ritual of making kimchi there's just something really beautiful about it and you know the the poses of the figures you never really see people like this depicted in you know a large kind of you know narrative historical painting format that i'm sort of taking this um you know my cultural ritualistic kind of activity and and and turning it into a piece of art so we're back here in the den area of my house well you know hideout i think um you know is is meant to be representative of you know my own personality too so if you see it from the outside it feel like it is this kind of like hidden gem on the street and then when you go and you open the door and then you see this like huge space inside it's just this you know it's like an opening into into my mind because uh you know i feel like you know maybe my presentation is not so impressive but then you know hopefully whatever is happening internally is a lot more interesting than what people expect [Music] i think i've always had a difficult relationship with you know being an artist and then also having to be an advocate for my own art and to be you know filmed for an interview and to have to you know be the front face for the work because i always felt like i wanted the work to speak for itself the work can always articulate things much better than i can and i never felt confident as the person that made the work i'm only the vessel through which you know that the work can come to life the with xiaohongshu i really appreciate their focus on authenticity with social media and with featuring artists from all over the world you know we create this dialogue and sharing and that we can you know show our authentic selves and not be afraid to share creativity and have more communication and also healing personal healing [Music]

Channel: Xiaohongshu

Views: 34,244

Keywords: Art, Xiaohongshu, painter, artist, studio, jamesjean, design, painting

Id: LXEEEWMZeUA

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022