We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christina Chung a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Christina , thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I’d always been a creative kid, and I’m really grateful to have been raised by parents that allowed and encouraged me to explore creative expression. I grew up dancing and entertained myself by drawing and writing stories.

Through my years at school, I always had a passion for art, but I had never considered that it could be a viable career path until the end of high school. While doing research for an art class assignment, I found the works of illustrators such as Jimmy Liao, Victo Ngai and James Jean. Of course I’d come across illustration throughout my life, but it wasn’t until this moment that it clicked for me. I was able to follow examples of living and working artists constantly adding to their body of work, which was such a change compared to looking at the works of iconic artists throughout history.

I was drawn to illustration specifically because it’s not just about creating pieces of art, but about interpreting concepts and creating visual solutions. As someone who really enjoyed writing, I saw it as another way to explore storytelling. I went on to study illustration at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and I’ve been working professionally as an illustrator ever since.

Christina, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Taiwanese-Hongkonger-American illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. I started out working largely as an editorial illustrator, creating works for newspapers, magazines and online publications. These days, my work has transitioned to mostly longer-term projects in publishing, advertising and institution illustration.

As an illustrator, my job involves a lot of problem solving. I like to think of it as solving visual puzzles. Clients come to me with a prompt, and that can be anything such as an article, a book manuscript, or a pitch for an advertising campaign. I then have to figure out how to reinterpret their prompt into a visual solution that still carries the same idea or message.

A personal challenge that I’ve had to work on throughout my career is finding the balance between creating work for my clients and the need to create work for myself. One of the downsides of monetizing something that you’re passionate about is the potential to lose the love that you have for it. So it’s really important to me to keep stoking that creative fire, with each job that I take on.

With all of my client projects, I always try to find a happy medium between creating an illustration that works for the client’s needs and creating something that can still be fun and fulfilling for me to work on. I like to utilize metaphor and symbolism in my illustrations, which allows for more opportunity to explore a variety of visual solutions, and selfishly, more fun things to draw. It’s also very important to me to make time to create art solely for myself, to refuel and bring fresh perspective into my professional practice.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being creative in your experience?

For me, simply being able to pursue what I’m most passionate about as a career, has been so rewarding. But beyond that, I’m grateful for all that I’ve learned as a result and how being an artist has allowed me to grow as a person.

I think one of the most rewarding things about illustration is how different each job is to the next. As a result, my illustration career has allowed me to learn about so many topics and perspectives that are new to me, and I’ve been lucky enough to work on many dream jobs with dream clients. Every job is a new challenge and an opportunity to grow, and I’m so grateful for that.

Some of my favorite jobs to work on are book covers and interiors. As I kid, I was a huge bookworm and to this day I can still remember so clearly the covers and illustrations in my favorite books, and how much of an impression they made on me. Now as an illustrator, it’s so rewarding to see books that I’ve done illustrations for sitting in bookstores and in libraries, with the possibility of making an impression on someone else’s life.

As a freelance illustrator and an independent artist, from day one it’s been a long journey trying to forge a path forward for myself, making the most of every opportunity that comes my way. It can be really easy when you’re constantly looking towards the future, to forget to take a second to look around at where you are now in the present. I think little Christina would be really proud to see how far we’ve come.

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

As a commercial illustrator making a living from creating illustrations for clients, I’m not always able to have full control over the work that I create. Especially in the first few years of working as an illustrator, taking on every job that came my way was how I drove my career forward and built the foundations of the body of work and client base that I have now.

With many more years of experience under my belt and a lot more financial stability, I’m grateful to be able to be more selective about the jobs that I take on. I look for work that touches on topics that I’m interested in, such as science, the natural world and stories by and about BIPOC. I’ve been able to work on projects that are more community-driven in recent years and I would really like to continue to do so. My hope for my work is to help bring attention to issues and stories that matter, and at the very least, provide a space for viewers to escape into another world, if only for a moment.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.christina-chung.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christinaillos/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/christinaillos

Image Credits
Photo by Bảo Ngô