Art Residency: Pop Up
Climbing mountains, picking flowers, and creating your own luck
The first week of the residency, Jenny encourages me to ask for what I want. “I’m low maintenance” I tell her. “You are NOT low maintenance, I want you to be high maintenance. Ask for exactly what you want. And maybe more!”
I used to believe that not wanting things was virtuous. Wanting leads to clinging, clinging leads to craving, craving leads to attachment, attachment leads to deep, deep sankharas, mental constructions that create suffering, Goenka, a meditation teacher, would say. When prompted for my opinion, I would say I had no preference, even if one existed. I repeated the response until I was blind to my own desires.
Is this it?
Throughout my life I have been told what to do. Don’t associate with those people, don’t tell people about yourself, apply to this school, study this subject, do as you’re told. My mom would pack my schedule full of extracurriculars. Tennis on Mondays, Swimming on Tuesdays, Math on Wednesdays, Badminton on Thursdays, Chinese on Saturdays, Piano and Violin on Sundays. If I wanted to do anything different, there wasn’t much space to voice a counter-offer.
Perhaps the most visceral life goal I had as a kid was to be free. I couldn’t wait until I was an adult, out of the house, with my own agency. So I dutifully walked the path laid in front of me, ensuring that the journey from childhood to adulthood—to freedom—would be as fast and smooth as possible.
A story that I hear sometimes goes something like: I had this goal, but when I got there, I wondered “is this it?” Everything had been built up to this moment, but the expectation of relief or happiness or excitement falls short. The rewards die down quickly, and an emptiness takes its place as we’re forced to reconcile a new reality: there are more mountains beyond this mountain.
When I achieved the only self-identified goal I had to “become a financially-stable adult outside of my parents’ control”, I was left with that emptiness.
Every mountain is interesting and significant in its own right. How do I choose the next one to climb?
An easy answer might be: climb the mountain that I want to climb. But up until the point I became a financially-stable adult eight years ago, I had conveniently conflated what my mom wanted of me with what I wanted for myself in order to achieve freedom. Now that I had “made it,” I had no other means to determine what I wanted. When asking myself the question, “what do I want to do with my life” I came up blank, so I thought I had no ambition, no goals, and no ideas.
Do I need to climb at all?
The San Francisco Bay Area is full of climbers. Rock climbers to be sure, but even more prominent are the status climbers. When I moved to Portland, OR in 2021, I was excited to be free from the pressure to be ambitious, successful, and climb the status ladder. But I still had a familiar angst of not knowing what to do with my life.
Believing that I was capable of whatever I set my mind to, Misha suggested, “just pick a project—any project, it doesn’t matter—and start.” Being good at doing as I’m told, I did just that. I told myself to stick with Portland to make it work. I thought that if I just stuck with something for long enough, past the trough of despair and the plateau of boredom, I would develop an affinity—passion, even—toward it.
I spent the next 2 years roller skating, road biking, playing ukulele, rock climbing, playing spike ball, dating, running marathons, fixing my sister’s old house, volunteering with AmeriCorps, meditating, and becoming a group fitness and yoga instructor. I tried to make a simple and happy cottage-core life in a city where “young people go to retire,” but I still felt empty, purposeless.
“I want to host a New Years reflection retreat/workshop where I’ll teach yoga, we’ll meditate, I’ll make a vegan lunch, and we’ll reflect on the year,” I tell my boyfriend at the time, excitedly. “I would be scared to do that,” he warns in response. It became clear that I want to have ambitions, goals, and ideas, and I grew weary of the lack of ambition around me in Portland.
Flower Walk, Sweet Talk
After two years, I had to admit to myself that Portland wasn’t working for me. “Your body isn't your slave,” my therapist would tell me. I kept forcing my body to do things that it never had a say in doing.
Jenny sets an alternative model for finding what she wants. Rather than a top-down approach of commanding oneself, she pauses to listen to her body, and then with that felt sense, will exclaim, “I would like to go draw at a bar, would you like to draw with me?!”
I take her approach as inspiration. I check in with my body and ask for what I want.
I want to go for a walk to pick flowers to press. I want company in talking to small businesses and asking them to sell my stickers in their shops.
Sunaya picks up my request. We go for a long walk exploring the abundant botanical blooms of the East Bay. We talk about art, our families, and our employment. She is naturally quiet in groups, but contains a wealth of beauty and knowledge. It is because of her suggestions that I start to interleave paper cuts and want to press flowers to experiment with in my artwork. By the time we get to the main street of small businesses, my notebook is packed full of flowers and leaves.
For our first stop, we enter a plant shop, Sunaya’s specialty. I muster the courage to talk to the shop owner about how they source their tchotchkes, but make no mention that I, myself, am selling my stickers. The next stop, Sunaya helps out. She has no fear talking to the shop owners when I’m feeling shy. By the end of it, we talk to 5 shops, one of which gives us an encouraging note saying they would likely buy the stickers I’ve made. I’m excited by this new-found confidence in talking about myself as an artist and someone whose work is worth buying!
Riding high from a productive flower harvest and breaking through my shyness to talk to shop owners, I walk down Valencia St the following weekend. A bookstore and a gift shop both buy my stickers, and I land an artist pop-up space for our artist collective in front of Often Wander.
Leave room for magic
“Ask for what you want and create your own luck,” they would say at StartingBloc. Luck is simply a function of putting yourself out there, asking for what you want, and opening yourself up to synchronicity. It’s how Emily got her piece in a show at Ritual Coffee while standing in line next to the curator of the show. It’s how Jenny landed a mural project at Stone Gold Pottery Studio. It’s how Xiaofan landed a client for her photography branding business. It’s how I landed a pop-up space at Often Wander.
“What would be a magical outcome?” Jenny frequently asks. For this pop-up event, I would love to make a sale to a perfect stranger, get noticed by a gallery owner, curator, or art consultant, and land a perfect client for one of us.
We hope to see you this Saturday, July 13! Bring your friends, take your artist on a date.
Let’s make magic happen together ✨
