I LOSE A LOT OF SLEEP TO DREAMING

Chinatown Soup is pleased to present I Lose A Lot Of Sleep To Dreaming, an exhibition of drawings, paintings, and paper paraphernalia by Choichun Leung that is on view from Monday, September 20th - Sunday, September 26th in harmony with the Mid-Autumn Moon festival. This is a time of illumination and community. Please join us for an artist Q&A on Wednesday, September 22nd, RSVP here.

I Lose A Lot Of Sleep To Dreaming introduces drawings that started The Young Girl Project, an autobiographical narrative of transformation. This project honors the steps to balance and explores healing through connection to Source and creativity. Seeking to replace fear with positivity and connection with isolation, the artist taps possibilities for us to re-create ourselves and our environments.

This exhibit features drawings and paintings at Soup Gallery alongside zines, stickers, and prints from The Young Girl Project at the Chinatown Soup Zine Wall to foster conversation about the pressing issue of child sexual abuse with a focus on prevention.

And now, a word from the artist—

I have kept a dream journal for years, and these night-time journeys inspire and inform my art with happenings from my day and the morphing of its impact and narrative by night. Art is where my dream world and reality collide and becomes physical.

My work interprets and documents the symbols and visual data of ‘memory clips’ from experiences in both worlds and is my connection to the subconscious and the magical. Art is my vehicle to visually communicate and tell stories, to inspire dialogue, education, and healing, encouraging viewers to overlay their own story, memory, or meaning and creating the space for interpretation. To change the world, you start by changing yourself. By instigating recollection, powerful conversations begin as people explore self-discovery, truth, and transformation.

Since a child, I have doodled the heads and faces of three girls on the backs of receipts, envelopes, scraps of paper, anything I could find, later discarding and starting over again.

In 2012, a friend saw me doodling and asked why I stopped at the heads and encouraged me to draw the bodies. I replied I was an abstract painter, not a cartoonist, quickly realizing I was restricting my creativity by a label I was giving myself.

The next day I bought small sketchbooks and started drawing the girls’ non-stop, including their bodies. The girls then multiplied into armies of females, and around them, ever-expanding universes of images and scenes mined from memories and dreams I had long hidden away.

Drawings came out that both shook and calmed me. Through drawing, I retrieved my past, and in reconnecting the body to the head, unified my fragmented self.

Choichun Leung is originally from Wales, UK and has been a Brooklyn, New York resident since 1994. Leung earned a BA (Hons) Degree in Silversmithing at Loughborough College of Art/Design, UK, and is a self-taught painter, previously working as a background artist for animation film in Hong Kong and assistant to pop artist Peter Max in NYC. Leung began exploring memory via painting in 2006, the abstract slowly became literal, and in 2012 she started a series of personal autobiographical drawings. This accumulation of work was the beginning of The Young Girl Project, a visual narrative of childhood sexual abuse and the lasting effects on her as a young girl and adult.

What began as a single sketch is now a multi-disciplinary art project of drawings, paintings, film, zines, activism, and collaborations. Leung also serves as the subject and producer of The Art of Survival, a mixed-media documentary currently in production, following the progress of the autobiographical drawings she started in 2012. Leung has had editorials in CR Fashion Book, Allure, and Puss Puss Magazine, raising awareness of this issue to its audiences through art. The Young Girl Project is now a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization (www.theyounggirlproject.org).