Winged Seeds
May 20 - September 2025
Think!Chinatown is excited to present Winged Seeds by New York-based artist Jia Sung, who brings together painting and collaborative textile. Composed of painted portraits framed by embroidered motifs of so-called “invasive” plants, the exhibition gathers diasporic memory, family archives, and ecological entanglements. Shaped in collaboration with Chinatown community members, workshop attendees gathered to stitch the frames for painted ancestral portraits and share family histories—interweaving personal memory with the legacy of displacement.
Exhibit-Related Programs
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jia Sung (b. 1992, Minneapolis, MN) is a Singaporean Chinese artist and educator whose practice spans painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, writing, and translation. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert conventional archetypes of femininity, queerness, and otherness. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as Wave Hill, the Hessel Museum, and EFA Project Space, has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and the Poetry Foundation, and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Special Collections at Yale, RISD, and SAIC. She is the author of Trickster’s Journey, a Chinese mythological tarot deck and guidebook, published with Running Press in 2023, and has taught with organizations like the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, NYU, and RISD. @jiazilla / jia-sung.com
Think!Chinatown is a place-based intergenerational non-profit in Manhattan’s Chinatown, working at the intersection of storytelling, arts and neighborhood engagement. We believe the process of listening, reflecting and celebrating develops the community cohesion and trust necessary to work on larger neighborhood issues. By building strength from within our neighborhood, we can shape better policies and programs that define our public spaces, celebrate our cultural heritage and innovate how our collective memories are represented.