HONG KONG GARDEN

Chinatown Soup invites you to the launch of the Hong Kong Garden Tarot by Soup Studio resident artist Julia Popescu, marking the Year of the Snake. Join us for the opening reception on Friday, January 31, 2025, 6 - 8pm to celebrate this project and its Lunar New Year debut in Chinatown.

Julia Popescu, working under the moniker Snakes for Hair, presents Hong Kong Garden, a 78-card Tarot deck that blends traditional Tarot symbolism with references to the I Ching, Chinese mythology, botanical imagery, world mysticism, and punk aesthetics.

Julia’s response to being part of the Chinatown Soup community and neighborhood evolved into HKG—a mysteriously personal and superconscious expression of the city as allegory. For Julia, the grounds of this mind palace are in Hong Kong, a place she has long mythologized through books, movies, and her favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees song, Hong Kong Garden. Drawing from influences as diverse as old Chinese art auction catalogs and Wong Kar Wai films, she created a Tarot deck that departs from decidedly western iconography, blending elements of the modern and mundane within an esoteric perspective. 

Key inspirations, like the florals on Maggie Cheung’s cheongsam, a mint-green jadeite teacup, and the urban garden featured in In the Mood for Love, come into flower amid a fertile realm of color and texture, recalling the five senses. Sweet fruits and medicinal herbs, gentle waves, thick leopard fur, smooth carved stone, shiny coins, papered faces, and polished wood instruments are but a few standout sensory elements of this liminal garden. Julia views collage as a magickal technique, using the cut-up method to disassemble and rearrange seemingly unrelated images, creating new connections. These relationships, she believes, can be decoded to reveal messages, transforming the collage process into a ritual of divination and therapeutic self-discovery.

Julia also explores the complexities of Chinese spiritual traditions, myths, and the nuanced relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. The deck is a metaphorical soup, its core unmistakably Asian, yet enriched by global influences like ancient Egyptian mythology and Italian Tarot traditions—much like Hong Kong, historically an inimitable portal to the East and a vortex in and of itself.

This deck invites all, from Tarot newcomers to seasoned readers, to deepen their connection with the archetypes, symbols, and stories embedded within its imagery. Guided by a thoughtful companion booklet, users are encouraged to engage in introspection, receive psychic downloads, and weave personal narratives.

As Julia describes, Hong Kong Garden is more than a deck. It is an interactive artwork. “May your passage be met with truth, transformation, and abundance. May your garden grow.”

In addition to the Tarot deck, the exhibition will feature original hand-cut collage artworks, fine art prints, and relevant found-object ephemera selected from the artist’s vault of vintage treasures. Visitors are invited to explore and acquire these talismanic creations, each offering a glimpse into the artist’s dreamscape and the intricate magickal symbolism woven into Hong Kong Garden.

Julia Popescu (b. 1980, Washington, DC) is a collage artist whose work is rooted in Tarot, archetypes, and surrealism, with an aesthetic shaped by 90s zine culture. Working as Snakes for Hair, Popescu treats collage as a magickal act, using the cut-up method to transform disassembled images into new narratives and divine messages. Her practice is a fusion of alchemy, divination, and artistic storytelling, creating works that exist as portals to the spiritual and symbolic.

Hong Kong Garden was designed by 16B Studio.