Why is James Jean on Xiaohongshu-

Hey, welcome in. Oh, welcome to my... Welcome to this... Okay, welcome to my studio. Or maybe start with, Hi, I'm James Jean. Welcome to my studio. Okay. 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 Taiwan, and then I moved to New Jersey when I was three years old. So basically, the studio used to be a Frank Gehry home from 1976, and I took it over 2015 and completely renovated it. 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. 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 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 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, 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 done. So was that too in-depth, or do you want to make it more? You want to be deep? Okay, okay. Yeah, I didn't know if I was answering other questions. 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 an immigrant and encouraged to blend in and speak English. And so because I didn't feel like 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 recurring character in my work. He's someone that is kind of floating between cultures. Usually I have him depicted like upside down, a plane of glass or a mirror. So the Descendant is invented, you know, it's kind of representative of me in a way where his identity or his cultural ties are very unsettled, and he's kind of just caught between things. And also the idea that he's called a Descendant, kind of referencing my son in a way too. So as far as James goes, I guess they just liked, my parents really liked the alliteration, so like the J and the J. But also James at the time was really popular. So they were, in my elementary school, there were actually, there were two other Chinese boys. There was three total, including me, and we were all named James. 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. It's kind of weird. Oh, you want me to come down here? Oh yeah. Are you trying to come down? I think he wants to come down. Go, you're free. Hey, hey, hey, hey. So this is Miso. He's a rescue from Skid Row. We got him when he was about a year and a half old. We just turned this into a dog video. It'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. Being Asian American, it's I think really important to kind of connect to that history. Even my earlier work, you can see how there's a lot of Eastern influences from Chinese silk scroll paintings, and now that my work has reached a global audience, I do want to connect with China more directly 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. So we get these really interesting effects. These are still in its kind of middle phase. Here we have three people preparing kimchi, and I'm a big fan of kimchi. 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 the poses of the figures. You never really see people like this depicted in a large kind of narrative historical painting format that I'm sort of taking this cultural, ritualistic kind of activity and turning it into a piece of art. We're back here in the den area of my house. Hideout, I think, is meant to be representative of my own personality too. So if you see it from the outside, I 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 my mind because I feel like maybe my presentation is not so impressive, but then hopefully whatever is happening internally is a lot more interesting than what people expect. I think I've always had a difficult relationship with being an artist and then also having to be an advocate for my own art and to be filmed for an interview and to have to 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, the work can come to life. 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.