We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Luin Joy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Luin below.
Luin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
In my work, ‘meaningful’ is a guiding principle that I look for in everything I do. This year, one of the most meaningful projects has been finalizing and launching my Holy Wonder deck.
A few years ago, I started making my own affirmation and divination deck out of altered playing cards after seeing a friend’s collection of handmade cards. I had this moment of realization and empowerment seeing how simple and available it was to just create my own deck with whatever words or images I needed. The first deck I made was really just a personal use item- something I carried with me for support during a challenging life chapter. It was short phrases, mostly my own writing and research, or revelatory things I had heard from others that helped me re-orient and de-program some of my negative inner dialogue.
I made a version of the deck for my mom and one day she sent me a photo of some cards she pulled for herself that morning. Suddenly, seeing someone else supported by this tool and having my work reflected back to me, awakened a feeling of pure joy and clear purpose. When I get that distinct purpose-driven feeling, I always follow it. It’s like being given a green light that I’m on to something much larger than myself that belongs in the world. Art has the power to heal, liberate, and world-build. Being an Artist is sacred work and I feel like my main responsibility is to stay deeply connected to my intuition, to collective energy, and remain open to divine guidance, which for me, often shows up in my connections with other beings and time spent in nature.
A few months after I made the deck for my mom, I brought my personal deck with me to visit my grandma in the hospital. When she saw them, she lit up and had this profound reaction that activated that same purpose-driven feeling in me. I taped her 6 favorite cards to a piece of paper and hung it near her hospital bed. They really helped her feel less alone during that period. I think the cards’ handmade, well-loved energy, acted as a comforting beacon in a sterile medical environment. The staff at the nursing facility also really resonated with them and it gave me a window into how this deck could ripple out and become something that might help a lot of people, across a lot of different settings and circumstances. That’s my dream for this deck and in the past few months, I’ve seen it reach more people than I ever imagined.
It’s a really vulnerable and tender project and I sense that is why it seems to touch people’s hearts. I’m currently selling them with a local printshop and gallery in North Carolina called PEEL, and on my webstore, https://luinjoy.com/holy-wonder-shop- . My goal is to expand to sell with some of my favorite shops and independent bookstores across the country, and obtain funding to send free copies to nursing homes, hospice centers, recovery centers, therapeutic settings, schools, and any other place that might benefit from this resource.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Luin Joy (he/him) and I’m an artist, musician, writer, creative coach, facilitator, and healer. I’m also queer, a trans man, white, neurodivergent, a survivor, a person grateful to be in recovery, and a lifelong student. I believe art is inherently spiritual and I feel blessed and honored to create and live in my purpose.
I completed a Master of Fine Arts degree, with a concentration in Sculpture and Performance, in 2020 at School of The Art Institute of Chicago. In 2015, I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design. I’ve been exhibiting work internationally since 2014, attended residencies with ACRE (Steuben, WI), SPACE Gallery (Portland, ME), Black Mountain School (Black Mountain, NC), The Chautauqua School of Art (Chautauqua, NY), The Neighbors (Chicago, IL), and have had solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, PA, Portland, Maine, and most recently, in New Orleans, LA. I am also a community leader and facilitator for School of the Alternative, an incredibly unique experimental art school and non-profit located in Black Mountain, NC.
I grew up in a rural area of the Northeast in the US, have moved a couple dozen times since childhood, and am currently based in Durham, North Carolina. My studio practice is multi-dimensional and is my primary focus for work and livelihood. I recently launched an online store and will be selling art, hand-made objects, spiritual goods, and coaching services. https://luinjoy.com/holy-wonder-shop- My first product, the Holy Wonder deck, was just released in June.
I’m most interested in world-building, collective healing and liberation, and the power of divine trans imagination/embodiment. I aim to make work that distills complex systems, connects disparate threads, dismantles cis-het limiting beliefs for the benefit of all gender expressions, illuminates trans/queer wisdom, invites healing, and creates alternate realities through performance, writing, sonic sculpture, painting, spiritual practices, and any other mediums that feel best suited to my goals and concepts in each project.
Sometimes this looks like covering the walls of my studio with writing on scraps of paper, making a series of paintings inspired by Grecco-Roman wrestler-masculinity, creating an album of collaged sound and field recordings, facilitating a workshop on art as an act of self-acceptance, crafting a live performance, or making art with my grandmother.
I began making art at a young age and was primarily interested in painting, drawing, and music. I was also deeply involved in sports and to this day, movement continues to be a core part of my care rituals and self-expression. As a queer, gender-nonconforming kid growing up in a conservative, rural town, creating art was a vital portal for me to access a sense of safety and be able to see myself belonging somewhere in the world. I have always been very ambitious, dream-focused, and future-oriented and there is admittedly a whole lot of Capricorn in my birth chart (though I am firmly an Aquarius).
I came out as queer as a teenager and since childhood, battled with a persistent feeling of disconnection and misalignment with my body and presentation. I eventually came out as transgender after finishing my undergraduate degree at age 22 in 2015. For me, the path of medical transition was life-saving. I began hormone replacement therapy 9 years ago while living in Georgia and though primarily for gender affirmation, it had the added benefit of resolving health problems and chronic illness that I’d been battling since I was 16. No more hospitals or ER trips and I was finally beginning to grow into a body and gender that felt correct for me.
I’m 31 now and until my mid-20s, I had very few examples of other queer or trans people just living life and thriving as people in the world. Growing up without that can make it really difficult to imagine having any future at all- just experiencing normal human stages of life, reaching old age, etc. For a lot of reasons -most notably the legal and logistical barriers to education, healthcare, employment, housing, and supportive family systems- for most trans people, our stages of life often look radically different than dominant cultural norms and timelines. Trans and queer people have always survived by inventing new ways to live and navigate the world. My art practice grows out of that orientation to life and invites others into this psychic space where there are many options and valid ways to exist. There is deep wisdom, resilience, and also pain and fear in our communities. I believe compassion is a vital, humanizing gateway to connection across difference, so even if some people can’t understand or relate to being trans or queer, everyone, in their own way, can understand how exhausting and difficult it is to live with pain and fear.
There’s a lot to unpack there, but overall, these concepts have been the focus of my art practice for many years now. If you pay any attention at all to the media, it’s clear that a lot of people feel quite threatened and destabilized by the mere existence of trans people- by what we represent to them, and by the possibility that there is more than just binary gender/sex (even though this has always been true).
I think what many people aren’t able to recognize is that their fear isn’t based in trans people actually being dangerous, because there’s no factual evidence for that. It’s based in a fear of losing control and being faced with their own unstable sense of self. Which I think is extremely ironic, given how we’re being talked about nowadays. I notice that our presence triggers an identity crisis for some people, which then gets projected outward as anger, fear, blame, etc. and it turns into these conversations, articles, and headlines about “safety”, mental illness, and “things getting out of control”. When ultimately, they have tremendous internal, personal identity work to do because to be frank, no amount of trans/queer elimination will resolve an unstable core self if just the thought of us existing is enough to make someone spiral and come undone. I don’t have all the answers, by any means, but to even arrive at the awareness that I’m trans, required substantial introspection, healing, and stabilizing my core self to be able to show up authentically in the world.
I share all of this because these parts of myself and my experience are hyper-relevant to the art that I make, how I show up in the world, and the kind of transformational work that I do with people as a creative coach and facilitator. I have years of layered, lived experience with personal growth and development, healing, embodying authenticity, navigating uncertainty, coping with rejection, reading people and situations, honing intuition – all of my lived experiences, education, and the guidance of trusted mentors, have equipped me with a toolshed of skills that I’m able to apply to my art and the work I do to help activate untapped strength, creativity, and potential in others. Coaching is a deeply fulfilling practice that also allows me to co-create with the people I work with. All of my embodied knowledge is a cherished gift and my goal every day is to just follow my purpose while I’m here and channel wisdom, clear vision, and awareness into all of my endeavors.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
For a long time, I was told by some family members that I would never be able to make any money with my art. It may have been coming from a “protective” place, or was just a wounded projection inside certain people, but because that idea is unfortunately so prevalent in our culture as well, it has taken a really long time to unlearn that and to heal my relationship to making money and valuing my work. I’m still working through that in major ways.
It’s true that this is a very competitive field, but that doesn’t mean that no one is able to succeed. It’s also an enormous industry, which means there is a lot more room in it than people realize. I accepted a long time ago that it would require tremendous hard work. But I have also always had an innate, powerful sensation that this is truly my correct path. I’m an artist and I can’t deny that purpose because it shows up in everything that I do and I’m in love with it.
In my life now, that has taken shape in ways far beyond my imagination, especially as someone who works across a wide range of mediums. I was still receiving that discouraging messaging about making a living this way, even after a long exhibition history and earning my Master’s with a distinguished scholarship, from a highly competitive school. At a certain point, I had to acknowledge that the messaging wasn’t actually about me at all, or my likelihood of success. I was already succeeding and disproving that negative message in many ways. It’s mostly just a reflection of our culture and the way that artists are generally pretty undervalued and under appreciated, while also being essential to our every day lives. The idea that artists don’t matter is completely an illusion and this was confirmed for me through a wild plot twist on my resume.
For a period of time, I had a job as a Design Patent Examiner, which means I spent my days reviewing designs for new inventions. It was a job that specifically hired artists for our specialized training in analyzing and synthesizing visual information. I was exposed to this enormous archive of inventions, discoveries, novel approaches, and innovations – some were miraculous and some were extremely mundane. I can’t tell you how many musical shower heads exist in the world, but it’s honestly too many. In a weird way, doing that work really convinced me to stop thinking of my own creations and innovations as less worthy or undeserving of being in the world. If someone was bold enough to design and profit off of eight versions of a duck-shaped computer mouse, why was I wasting time believing that my work did not have value, could not succeed, and couldn’t be sold? Especially when, in contrast, it held so much depth, intentionality, and authenticity?
I know that beyond being my career, my art practice is a lifelong companion. I’m extremely grateful every day to be so deeply in touch with that and to have maintained this dedicated relationship with making art for almost 17 years now. No two artists careers are identical, and I think that could easily be said for any field, but this one in particular has very few guardrails or paved roads. It’s unfolding in the present and I’m learning how to be guided by my own, handcrafted compass.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
As I imagine many people can relate to, one of my major pivot moments in the past few years happened in March/April of 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic. I was in the final semester of my MFA program and had been preparing for my thesis exhibition for the past 7-8 months. The thesis exhibition is the culminating moment for many MFA programs where you’re able to present your work to your graduate cohort, faculty, and the public at large. It’s a major opportunity for visibility and making vital career connections. I had poured a ton of energy and resources into crafting what was going to be a live performance in April 2020, but of course, everything shut down on March 9th and all exhibitions and performances were cancelled and postponed indefinitely.
The performance I’d been working on started the year before, when I began researching highschool wrestling culture and Grecco-Roman style specifically, as a way of understanding coming-of-age masculinity rituals in a sports context that is highly focused on aesthetics as well as physical strength. At the same time, I was also in an acute moment of trying to understand my own identity in the world, as someone who is trans masculine and queer, but assumed to be cisgender and straight in my daily life out in the world. It’s still a very disorienting and disembodying experience and had only begun to happen consistently about a year or two before that time.
I was working on unpacking all these layers of gender and perception and came up with this idea that with my “new” body type, via my journey of medical transition, I could very easily pass for someone who was a former wrestler in highschool. It varies of course, but is kind of a very specific cis male body type – often on the shorter side, very muscular, and with square proportions. As someone who is not actually cis or a former wrestler, I was really interested in how the concept of illusion comes into play with how every person shows up in the world. What identities or parts of self we choose to claim, what we “pass” for, what is projected onto us, and where truth and illusion blend together.
I decided to embark on this research project of learning to wrestle and training incognito with adult cis male wrestlers, in theory to try and understand the backstory of this character. I was very deep into the physical training aspect and was working out nearly every day of the week and learning how to choreograph movement. The project unfolded in some really surprising and intense ways. I decided it would become a live wrestling performance for my thesis presentation and ended up casting someone to play my body double / wrestling partner, teaching them to wrestle, and then developing choreography together that “looked like” wrestling, but was also something a bit strange and collaborative. I was kind of in a rut with some aspects of the performance when COVID hit and I had to pause everything and completely reimagine the project.
It ultimately ended up being a blessing for this work because I had to sit down and comb through all the material I had already gathered to get to the core of what this piece was about, then figure out how to transform it into something entirely different. The real blessing was that I ended up making my first experimental album that was a 20 track sonic sculpture compiling all of the sound elements and conversations I’d been having about the work throughout the process of training and planning everything. It’s an emotional album and feels really aligned with what this work was ultimately trying to accomplish. It also opened me up to the format of an album and I love working in that framework now. It allows for so much play and creativity, and I enjoy creating a sonic collection that all works together to tell a story.
A few months after finishing the album, I made a film from my compiled footage throughout the whole process to present the narrative visually, and after more time had passed, I was able to better express the intent of this project. It was hard to identify while I was deep in it, but I think the point of the experience for me ultimately was to learn how to really live in my new masculine body. And beyond that, to learn how to not be afraid of men, as I was beginning to look like the kind of man that I was so deeply afraid of as an adolescent girl. That fearful part of myself that was conditioned by my early experiences in a very different kind of body, didn’t know how to reckon with how this new body was taking shape. I think it was an intensely healing and awakening process for me and I don’t think that would’ve unfolded if it had just been the initial planned performance. The piece is called Intricate Rituals, (a nod to Barbara Kruger), and is on my website and on Vimeo.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://luinjoy.com
- Instagram: @loo_en
- Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/BDVFQsX3gygMvEzZA
Image Credits
Image credit for studio portrait – Lauren Frey