Pronouns: They / TA/ 他 /elle / él
Jing Jing Wang is a sappy queer alien who loves a lot of things very deeply. They are a multidisciplinary artist and intersectional feminist who participated in Rainbow on the Eastside from 2022-2023 as a Redmond resident. They have since relocated to Seattle, but Redmond will always be their hometown. Both Redmond and Seattle are on the ancestral homelands of the Duwamish Tribe. (www.realrentduwamish.org/)
Jing Jing graduated from Pitzer College where they studied Sociology and Gender and Feminist Studies. They now work at Seattle’s LGBTQ+ Center as a Youth Advocacy Co-Manager. Outside of work, they are passionate about a bit of everything and spend their time focusing on visual art, theater, writing, choreography, intergenerational connections, collaborative storytelling, zines, and community work. Jing Jing’s coming out story was published in the Stranger’s 2018 Queer Issue.
Jing Jing serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief for It’s Real Magazine, an online magazine destigmatizing mental health in Asian American communities. Their creative work can be found in The Stranger, Sex Positive Now: An Anthology of Movers and Shakers in the World of Sexuality, It’s Real Magazine, and the thirty plus sketchbooks stuffed in their bookshelf. They are also the designer of the “Let the Sunshine In” rainbow crosswalk in Redmond Downtown Park.
They can’t wait for whatever they’ll get up to next!
Instagram: @jingshiwang01 (Content note: artistic nudity)
What would you like the larger community to know about your identity?
I can lay out a laundry list of identities if I want to – and speak about the topic of identity for hours if I have the space. But right now what I want to highlight most is what being genderqueer, nonbinary, and transgender mean to me. Genderqueer is my chosen word because queerness has a history of deviance, revolution, and political coalition.
Queer is for everyone. Queer is forever in transit. Queer is not normal. When I say my gender is queer, I’m saying my gender is whatever I want it to be. Genderqueer is my flag of autonomy. A public statement that I have the right and power to decide my own identity. I want people to erase their assumptions of me, starting from gender, and allow themselves to get to know me in all my complexity. Everyone deserves that.
With the never ending flood of anti-trans legislation that has picked up in recent days, I hope that everyone will stand up to actively support the trans and gender nonconforming community. I will be relying on the strength and resilience of my community, both trans and non-trans, as we continue fighting for liberation.
“8th Grade Depression”
This is an extremely vulnerable piece that deals with exactly what it says it does. During 8th grade, my depression came out in full force for the first time. At the time I was struggling so much that I couldn’t even muster up the willpower to draw in my sketchbook. It felt too final, like too much commitment.
Instead, I doodled bodies on everything – homework, sticky notes, index cards – and eventually, over the course of around two years, they started to look relatively anatomically correct. I also kept a “daily writing dump” which eventually became an absurdly long word document. I tried to write stream of consciousness style every day. I think I was in too deep for it to really make a difference, but it’s has made for some very interesting, cringey, and honestly painful reading material.
I also clearly remember drawing scribbly self portraits on the backs of white index cards and showing them to my mom, saying, “This is how I feel right now,” and hoping that it could explain what I could not find words for. Over time, my mother has become the strongest pillar in my support network and I survived and thrived even when I thought I couldn’t. Disability justice and mental health advocacy are close to my heart and this piece is an intricately crafted snapshot of a difficult time that has changed me profoundly.
“Trans Venus” and “Trans David”
The iconic imagery of Michelangelo’s David and the Venus de Milo came to mind as personifications of the gender binary, with all of their connotations of white classical western history. They are the blueprint against which we are measured. To depict these revered works of art with trans bodies hopefully makes the viewer stop to consider what is considered beautiful, monstrous, or normal.
“Neon Lights Self-Portrait”
I decided to use highlighter in this self portrait as a homage to the neon nighttime cityscapes of Asia, and because I was in the middle of a series of small drawings I called highlighter people, or more elegantly, fluorescent nudes. The Chinese characters in the back all represent something important to me.
It’s interesting looking back at the words I chose. Some include the name of the university where my parents met, art, dumplings, my grandma’s ethic minority background, gay/homosexual, and the names of a few family members. I also intentionally chose to draw myself wearing a more masculine but still traditionally Chinese piece of clothing. I think this is the first artwork I created that merged my Chinese and queer identities in a visual manner.