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

Hi Ava, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Ever since I was a toddler and could first pick up a pen, the things I loved to draw most were monsters: beasts, demons, skeletons, ghosts, fantastical hybrid creatures, and everything on the side of the strange and scary. I could draw them for hours on end, and was always fascinated by them. I liked to draw them for two main reasons: the first is that I simply thought that they had inherent beauty, and in that precious, young time before societal fears and preconceptions about what is “ugly” or “bad” were ingrained into me, I had uninhibited love and appreciation for them. The second is that drawing was a way for me to understand and work through difficult things that were otherwise hard for me to process. Through drawing, I could put forms and names and faces to the unspeakable; to the experiences I couldn’t categorize; to the painful things I couldn’t resolve. By giving the scariest, most intangible feelings a form, they become less scary. They even become worthy of understanding, worthy of attention, and worthy of care, so that I might learn to communicate and coexist with them. Thus, it was clear why I drew monsters. They, too, are historically a way for people to put a form to the things they couldn’t normally process or understand, in an effort to make sense of them somehow.

During the pandemic, I returned to monsters in full swing, and found solace in them when the world seemed to be full of things I couldn’t understand and pain I couldn’t process. As the world seemed to open up historical wounds, hatred and distrust proliferated, my family dealt with ongoing issues of our own, and my own pattern of growth was interrupted, my mental health greatly suffered. I finally found a way to communicate the way I felt through drawings. By giving a face to the monsters I was carrying with compassion, it gave me some solace and hope that I could understand them and find a way to live with them peacefully. So I started drawing monsters again, every day. I thought of them as portraiture, portraits of myself through the perspective of all of the messy, unresolved, painful, “scary” parts of me.

Eventually, when I returned to school, I started talking to my friends about my monsters, and realized that the prompt of talking about ourselves in terms of our monsters always opened up vulnerable, deep, and healing conversations between us. I had the idea then, that maybe I could use my artwork to facilitate such conversations, and allow people to see their own monsters that they carry. Thus began “Monster Portraits”, my series of collaborative ink drawings and paintings aimed to give forms to the painful things we all live with. As a prompt for my artwork, I started asking people the question: what monsters do you carry? What do you want people to know about your monsters? I started out by asking friends, and then moved to social media. I was shocked and moved when people started pouring their stories out to me from across the globe. They were stories about mental health and mental illness, about loss and grief, about struggles in limbo, about trauma and the echoes of violence, and so much more. Reading and listening to them all gave me a mission to follow through my artwork: to put names and faces to these stories.

And so that’s what I’ve been doing for the past several months. I make monster drawings based on the stories that people tell me, and by drawing them, I try my best to give some solace to what they are feeling, and spread awareness and support for whatever struggle that is. I’ve made monster drawings about mental health struggles – about Complex PTSD, PTSD, ADHD, Borderline Personality Disorder, Generalized Anxiety, Schizophrenia, and more – as well as stories about generational trauma, historical stories of violence, the story of a boy who ended up in juvenile hall and needs support, and many others. I have shared them in videos explaining the stories behind the artwork, and they have surprisingly reached millions of people over the past three months, communicating both people’s words verbatim and the artwork they inspired.

While drawing monsters was always a meaningful personal practice for me, this is heartening on an entirely different level. For the first time, I feel that my art is a truly collaborative and community-centered practice that actually provides some healing and good. I am able to communicate the power of monsters, of seeing something that you can’t otherwise communicate or categorize, to others, and they have been resonating and telling their own stories to others in the comment sections. Through monsters and scary things, people seem to have found some healing in the same way I was able to find healing. To me, this is what drawing monsters has always embodied, and is my way of getting back to the original motivations of my small three-year-old self, who carried an ever-abundant love for monsters and had not yet learned fear. I hope that I can continue for a very long time and look forward to seeing what methods of storytelling I can generate from the little monster community I’ve created.

Ava, 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 name is Ava Jinying Salzman, and I’m a visual artist and storyteller who aims to highlight beauty in what is normally considered scary, uncanny, or difficult to process. I have been drawing and painting all my life, and have used my process to help myself make sense of the changes that come with life. My main specialty is creating monsters, ghosts, phantoms, and beasts, although my work has explored many topics and subjects ranging from exploring the natural world and its conflicts, adaptations of previously untold historical narratives, and more.

Most of my current work is in pen-and-ink and ballpoint illustration in my “Monster Portrait” series, guided by the question: what monsters do people carry in their own lives? How can the representation and definition of a “monster” help people work through struggles that are difficult to voice or describe? After opening these questions to the public, I have received many stories from which I create pieces of artwork, with subjects ranging from mental health and mental illness, trauma, grief and loss, historical reckoning, and more. I use a “splashed-ink” method to create chaotic shapes, and use ballpoint pen drawing to make them into monsters that are inspired by the stories that people tell me, to make sense of the chaos. I share the process videos of creating my pieces of artwork and narrate the stories that inspired the work alongside them, in the people’s own original words. It is a unique combination of oral storytelling and visual storytelling, and is aimed to generate meaningful connections and interactions with the work as people connect their own stories to the monster art that they see. I hope to expand this project and look forward to seeing its future manifestations as I continue to publish my work.

In addition to my standalone illustrations, I have also worked in graphic novel writing and illustration for many years. After years of independent comic illustration, published in places such as the Harvard Independent, the Harvard Advocate, and the Washington Post, as well as commissioned work for organizations such as Earth League International and the Center for Cartoon Studies, I have learned a lot about visual storytelling and have redirected it towards my own work. My latest ongoing project is a graphic novel project comprising of short stories inspired by my own family history and Chinese ghost folklore, with the working title “Cracks”. The Chinese-American side of my family has lived in California since the days of the Transcontinental Railroad’s construction in the mid-1860s. Since then, each generation has had to fortify and rebuild itself in an American landscape haunted by living legacies of past oppression, hostility and destruction against communities considered “alien,” and the ongoing push and pull between assimilation and resistance caused by the ever-looming shadow of Chinese Exclusion Laws. I’ve dedicated the past four years to learning these family stories from my Poh-Poh (grandma), Connie Young Yu, and writing the script for a graphic novel adaptation of these stories, illustrating them as magical realist ghost tales in various mediums from pencil drawings to watercolor and acrylic. They are grounded in true oral narratives of Chinese-American immigration, poetry of former detainees on Angel Island, and the folklore of hungry ghosts, monsters, and other “strange tales” in Chinese folklore and literature.

My choice to use ghost folklore to adapt these family stories was intentional. The creation myths of my Chinese-American family are myths of violence, unrest, and, above all, in-betweenness – the repeated, real experience of being uprooted. Furthermore, each of these instances has had a continuous and ever-shifting afterlife. To me they are ghost stories, stories about those members of our family who have inhabited the in-between place from which there can be no complete recovery: Angel Island, refugee camps, fiery ruins of destroyed neighborhoods. Yet through a tradition of passing these stories down, we descendants reckon with this history by honoring our ancestors, our ghosts, and making space for them in whatever capacity we can in our present landscape. We might not be able to fix the brokenness from the past, or heal our ghosts, but we make our present landscape hospitable to them.

These are the kinds of stories that fascinate and move me, and I look forward to continuing this project amongst others. I am always exploring the stories of those who are unresolved or those whose stories have been repressed or misrepresented, and using the tools of artistic representation to face the phantoms with whom we share the current world.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

During the summer of 2021, when I was doing research for my graphic novel, I was living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in order to talk to more people about the history of the community and landscape. I was nervous and awkward, and found it difficult to connect with strangers immediately about such personal and wide-reaching topics. My first few days were spent wandering aimlessly around the streets of Chinatown and North Beach in the hopes that something would happen to spark a dialogue with the people I met. It was largely unsuccessful.

Then, one day, I sat down in Portsmouth Square with a sketchbook, and began to draw. I started drawing what I saw, how it made me feel, what it made me remember or imagine. What I found within minutes is that once people see you drawing, they become interested and come up to you to ask questions; the act of drawing becomes the point of interest that can lead to storytelling. Thus, much of my engagement with the landscape and the people within it was not only documented by drawings, but also caused by them. The more I drew, the more I got to know the people and place as they told me their own stories after seeing what I was drawing: my “drawing routes” took me deep into the shops, restaurants, stands, and street performers along Grant Avenue, one of Chinatown’s main streets; Portsmouth Square, where Chinatown elders and some other members of the North Beach community come to play cards, exercise, and play music; Caffe Trieste and the Beat art alleys; the Angel Island Immigration Station across the bay; and the benches in Washington Square Park. The simple act of sketching opened the doors to meeting so many people and hearing so many stories that would never have been open to me before. That research trip was a turning point for me: I had discovered how collaborative and generative art can be as a force in community.

Ever since then, I have pivoted my work to be both a reflection of and a catalyst for storytelling. In my latest monster portraiture project, I have used my monster artwork as a prompt for people to tell me their stories, and I have consequently received thousands of heartfelt, vulnerable, and powerful messages that never would have been previously materialized had there not been an artistic prompt for them. It has allowed me to learn from others, have meaningful conversations, explore ways to collectively heal, and create work that actually has an impact. The most rewarding part of posting my artwork online has been looking through the comment sections and seeing how people share their stories amongst one another and create their own miniature communities of support. I truly believe that artmaking is a fundamental way that people can see themselves and name the struggles that they are going through; being able to have it as a tool is the thing I am the most thankful for in my entire life.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’ve had many pivots in my journey towards where I am now, professionally and personally, that all had to do with me realizing that I cannot have the impact I want to have without embracing the person I am and what I am best suited to do. Growing up, the only way that I felt fully myself was when I was creating art at my own pace; however, when I was in high school and early college, the idea was drilled into my head that being an artist by itself is “not enough” to be able to effect change in the areas about which I was passionate. In my first years of college, I decided that I should abandon what I was good at and what I felt good doing in favor of what I thought was most useful. I became a biology major in the hopes of becoming a scientist, so that I could contribute to ecological research and activism work through professional research. I constricted my artistic work to only include it as a supplemental tool in order to explain academic topics. Most importantly, I became convinced that my whole rhythm of working and being a human being was wrong – for years, I forced myself to change the way I worked, scheduled, and lived my life in order to fit myself into the person I thought I should be.

Throughout those few years, I underwent the extremely difficult but necessary realization that I could not be the type of person I had originally thought would be the most impactful in the world. The more I tried to change the way I work, the more my work suffered; the more I tried to force myself to do work that I wasn’t particularly good at or well-suited to do, the more my mental health deteriorated and my energy I once had was sapped from me. I found that I wasn’t a science- or data-inclined person – that I constantly struggled with the type of work that other people in my major seemed to thrive at. I switched briefly to wanting to go into law, then academia, and both of these efforts went similarly to the first. At first, this was absolutely devastating, and I felt lost. I felt like I could not be who I was meant to be in the world. And then, inevitably, I fell back into artmaking as a means of saving myself. Immediately, I was completely rejuvenated.

When I finally gave myself permission to try to engage with the world in the way that made sense to me, in the way that was powerful to me, and the way with which I have naturally responded to the world all my life, then my energy to explore the topics I was passionate about returned. I found that my artistic practice was what gave me a unique angle when investigating stories; while I constantly felt stuck trying to give a truly meaningful contributions to the topics I cared about in a STEM setting, I found that it came naturally when I approached it with my own creative process. I was not only happier and more motivated to make work than I ever had been in my life, but I also made the most impact than I ever had while I was attempting to suppress myself. I was able to make work that started conversations, that spread awareness, that explored complexity, that illuminated the stories in neglected places. While it was not the type of work that I had originally envisioned would make a difference, and it felt overwhelming at times to start over my path from scratch, the fact that it was authentic to me reassured me that I was on the right track.

I share this because amidst the many societal pressures that young professionals face, especially those who are inclined towards the arts and humanities, I think we don’t hear it often enough that the projects, jobs, and practices where you feel most like yourself and the most at home are where you will be able to have the most impact. We are often encouraged to pursue our dreams, but often don’t hear that it’s okay to let go of certain dreams to embrace others. I felt a lot of undue shame for letting go of more academic ambitions, when it was, in fact, the most valuable thing I could have done, both for myself and for the communities and causes of which I wanted to be a part. It was important for me to find the areas where I felt the most settled and grounded first, in order to then find my ways of contributing to the world. Give yourself grace and the opportunity to explore, give up, let go, and rediscover.

Contact Info:

• Website: avajinying.com
• Instagram: @avajinying
• Facebook: Ava’s Monsters
• Youtube: Ava’s Monsters
• Other: Tiktok: @avajinying / Ava’s Monsters This is where I publish most of my work and deal with most of my communications!