Carina Sun — Ratrock Magazine

Feature by Jane Loughman

Photos by Gillian Cohen

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

My name is Carina Sun. I am a freshman at Columbia College hoping to study computer science with a concentration in visual arts. I grew up mainly in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It's a pretty small suburb. It's about an hour outside of Philly, but it's a very quaint town.

I'm a multimedia artist so I do pen and ink, sketching, oils, acrylics, and I also dabble in pastels. Recently I've been getting into graphic design work, so I've been really looking at animation and design softwares like Adobe. I've been studying art for about nine years now.

How did your interest in art come about?

I started art classes when I was six. Throughout middle school and growing up, I was kind of isolated in my ideas just because I grew up in a community that was very white, and there was not a lot of diversity. Art was my way to express my identity through my work because it was a time when I felt alone. I felt like nobody really understood what I was feeling so I turned to my art to convey these emotions. In the future, I hope that my art will be able to serve as a collaboration space, especially for Asian-Americans, to come together and find a shared identity.

You've said that you take a lot of inspiration from European, specifically Dutch art. Is there one artist in particular that you feel is your biggest inspiration?

I feel like it's a combination just because I use so many different mediums. Rembrandt’s use of lighting and portraits inspired my own portraits and human figures. The faces and emotions that he was able to convey play into how I paint my own figures. On the other hand, Hayao Miyazaki has a very different style and he does these amazing animations in terms of world-building, detail, and design. I take inspiration from that for a lot of my digital work that requires scenery or storytelling.

What does it mean to you to be an artist?

I want to put a piece of work out there and have people be able to tell what it is without having to wrack their brains to interpret it. I like to just put everything out there because I believe that art should be what the artists see and how they see beauty, and then they put that on the canvas for other people to imagine for themselves.

Do you like giving backstory for your art or do you prefer to keep it to yourself?

I like telling people about my vision, but only after they interpret it themselves. That’s how I am with movies; I like to watch it first and interpret it, but afterwards, I'll go and do all my research. I like having that final revelation.

Do you feel you're drawn to certain mediums depending on mood or is it about the subject of the art?

It's more about the mood I want to convey. I don't really do anything with sculpture or 3D design, but it’s something that I would like to get more into. I prefer traditional media like painting and drawing because it's nice to have the physical aspect there. Even if you're doing it on a tablet or your computer, you're not holding your piece of art; you don't have it physically with you. For traditional media, you can see the different stages it's in. You can prop it there, you can leave it for two years and not look at it and it'll still be exactly like that and you can still pick it up. I think that's really important to me and how I consider my chosen media.

I wanted to ask you about your film, The Last Journey. What inspired you to take on an animated short film?

During the pandemic, I had this big chunk of time and I needed to fill it with something. I was really big on watching movies, especially during the beginning of COVID. I just watched all the Miyazaki movies over again, and felt really inspired. After you see something that great, you just want to emulate it yourself. I wanted to pay tribute to his films in a way by taking inspiration from them. I really heavily studied the imagery and the backgrounds and I wanted to make this film beautiful.

It was my first time animating, and it was all frame by frame, which is so tedious. You have to draw every single movement, so that was pretty difficult. Figuring out the physics of it all too––there's a lot more math and physics than you would expect in making an animation, because the movements of the body have to do with how fast or how slow you pan the camera. It was nice and satisfying to see it fully with the music and the effects.

Did the pandemic affect your artwork or your work ethic?

I definitely found more time for my art. I started doing my art not just for school projects but for myself. During that time, with the rise in hate crimes against Asians in America, I started this nonprofit called DeclarASIAN. It's basically an empowerment platform. I started this initiative to distribute art supply packages and lessons to Asian-American artists who come from lower-income families and who weren't able to pursue art themselves. During that time, I felt expression was really needed, especially for people in the Asian-American community.

All these artists have their different stories and they tell their stories through the little descriptions on the website. It’s crazy to think that without these resources, they wouldn't have been able to show their voice, and get their art out there. I wanted DeclarASIAN to be that platform for them. So that was a big project that I worked on. We were also lucky enough to be featured on Next Shark!

Seeing these artists’ work was also really inspiring and revealing in the sense that you get this bond between their art and yourself, just being part of the same community. This also influenced my work when we went back to school in the fall and I started working on my AP Art portfolio. I was originally going to do these little tidbits of life, snapshots of going to the cafe, for example, for my theme, but instead, I chose to focus on this idea of Asian-American empowerment in my paintings.

I was really intrigued by your work Cherish. What is the story behind it and what do the fish and the mirror image mean to you?

The mirror is a metaphor for looking at yourself and not being able to see which side, or who, you are. I have this more Westernized version of myself in the purple jacket and everything, and I'm looking into the mirror at this very traditional Eastern dress, showing the idea of being okay with that. I chose to make her expression very serene and calming. For the background, I wanted to make it more Westernized to contrast the Eastern element of the reflection, and so I have the pearls. The mirrors are very ornamental in a Western-style, and the candles and everything. For the fish, I took inspiration from woodblock cut fish from Japanese culture. They're supposed to be swimming around in this kind of surrealistic setting. That was inspired by the surrealistic nature of Miyazaki’s works and how he combines reality with imagination.

I would love to know more about Ancestry as well. Who is this, and what's the story behind it?

I started Ancestry pre-COVID, but it took me all the way until the end of 2020 to complete. I wanted to explore the juxtaposition between Eastern and Western culture in this piece as well. The background is very Eastern: you have the traditional Chinese folding screen. It’s subtle in the inclusion of the two elements, and they blend together if you're not paying attention. So the face is supposed to be Chinese, or she's supposed to be Chinese-American, but then she's dressed in this very traditional Marie Antoinette-esque attire––she has the headdress on and everything. If you don't look anywhere else but her face or her hair, you can't tell that there's this juxtaposition, these two themes going on. I wanted to play into that kind of blending of the two and show that they're not so different and that you can have both of them, blended smoothly, simultaneously. If you look closely, you'll notice. I don't know if you've ever watched Miyazaki movies, but the earrings she's wearing, there’s a green emerald, and then a red pearl. That's the earring of Howl.

Your painting Turmoil also caught my eye. Is it meant to be a depiction of The Little Mermaid or is there a different story for it?

It is not meant to be The Little Mermaid, but I see it now. This is the second biggest painting that I did. I was really unfamiliar with acrylics when I started it. It took me almost a year, just going back and amending stuff. This is supposed to highlight inner turmoil. This painting was made before I did my other works on Asian-Americans, so it’s just me getting my bearings. It's supposed to be this ship crashing into the rocks and this big fiery action scene. You also have the mermaid who's sitting there, supposed to be pointing at the little people. I don't know if you can see from the picture but they're standing on the helm of the ship. I also added that little area of blue sky to symbolize how there's always light coming through and this is not the end. Kind of like a symbol of hope for the clouds to open up.

Do you have an idea of what you want to do after college?

I would love to stay in New York just because it’s the perfect place to share and find ideas. The world of art galleries and directors and collectors and designers here is so big and I would love to do something where I could work with an art gallery.

On the other hand, with my computer science major, I would love to do something with graphic design. That plays into how I said that art should transcend the boundaries of the canvas because with graphic design, there are so many canvases: it'll literally get posted everywhere if it’s successful. That power to reach millions of people is important to me. I would obviously want to do it with something that has meaning, so I would enjoy working as a designer for a nonprofit in the city or something.

If you had to pick one piece as your favorite, what would it be?

Whenever I asked my art teacher this, he's always like, “it's like you're asking me to pick my favorite child!” So rather than a piece, my favorites would be my collection of originals, which are the first six paintings in my portfolio, the ones that have to do with my Asian identity. That collection contains the topic that matters most to me.

Do you have any advice for budding artists?

I think I would say having an artistic mindset isn’t something that comes naturally; you have to train at it like you have to train any other skill. Don’t be discouraged with your first piece or your second piece or even your third piece, because it takes more than that to create a work that you're satisfied with. Definitely just keep going at it because, no matter what age you are, you still have the time. If you just have a pencil and paper, you can do it. You can make art.

Thank you so much, Carina! Where else can we find your work and stay up to date?

My website is www.carinasunn.com/ and my Instagram is @carinasunn.

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