We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nina Huang. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nina below.

Nina, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The most meaningful piece I created was during my senior year at School of Visual Arts. Since I often talk about it, it now feels like an old story. But even after bringing it up so many times, I still believe it‘s a great project. The final product consists of five interview stories, featuring five artists living in New York, all from different fields, yet at some point in their lives, they each found themselves drawn to art and made a splash in their own worlds.

I’m obsessed with interacting with people and listening to life stories so I ended up creating this interview journal series. Every page in the journal, every letter, and every little doodle in the corners were all done by me. The creation didn’t happen overnight, since I didn’t start with this theme in mind at the very beginning, it evolved as I went along, much like filming a documentary, where you shoot as you go.

Nina, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My creations mostly stem from life itself. I’m not just saying, it’s not that life inspires me, but rather that I’m simply recording life as it happens. Living in a vibrant city like New York, reality itself can be overwhelming.

I have always believed that New York leaves a mark on everyone who has ever lived here. Studying abroad wasn’t easy, the sense of belonging is always an unavoidable topic when I talk to friends. I’ve always seen myself as a passerby in this city, feeling that I don’t quite belong here. That was until one time, on a flight back to China, I was watching ‘Ocean’s 8.’ When Awkwafina appeared on screen, I was surprised to recognize the place. “Hey, I know this area. That’s Elmhurst, the bustling, overcrowded Chinese supermarket I’ve been to!” Scene after scene, the familiar street views kept coming, I remembered these places from the movie, and I remembered how I felt the last time I passed by them. At that moment, I realized that part of my roots seemed to have grown here, firmly intertwined with the soil of New York.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

It’s a great question, but also a difficult one to answer. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I have always felt that creating and producing art brings me an unparalleled sense of self-actualization. During my college period, I took a gap year in between and worked in jobs completely unrelated to art. When I wasn’t creating art, I was simply working for money, trading my time and brainpower for money. No ideals, no beliefs, and no long-term goals, just purely trading.

After that experience, I vaguely realized that for me, art is “what you want to do once you’re no longer hungry.” As a young adult just stepping into this real world, many of the things I do now are for survival. Survival is not that hard, it can even be simplified to having a place to sleep and food to eat. Being an artist, using my skill to show others my perspective of the world is everything I want to do after I have a place to stay and enough food to eat.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The thought I once held most firmly was that a drawing had to look realistic, the more accurate it was, the better the quality of the artwork. Growing up, I received many compliments like, “It looks so realistic, just like a photo,” which led me to believe that the level of realism equated to one’s artistic skill.

However, in the past period, I realized that’s not the case. Last year, I did a lot of on location sketchings, in parks, airports, and on subway. These are all crowded places where people only stopped for a while. If I want to capture that present moment, there wasn’t much time to think, as soon as I put my pen down, whatever I saw was what ended up on the paper.

At first, it took me a long time to get used to it, to get used to drawing a line without prior thought, to accept a figure with incorrect proportions, to embrace what I once considered “mistakes and unacceptable” in my work. But when I looked back at those sketches later, I was surprised to find that many of them were so powerful. The rough lines are fresher and more captivating than the pieces I had taken my time to draw meticulously. It took me quite a few years to realize that when a piece resonates emotionally with people, technique no longer matters.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ninahuangart.com
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/ninayhuang