In the modern world, our career paths aren’t straight lines. They bend and merge and split and sometimes there’s a gap in the path that we need to navigate. So we thought, who better than an interdisciplinary scholar to show us the way?! Qissa speaks to Jasmine Gui about her career path and how she combines different fields within her work.
Jasmine Gui is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist and researcher living in Canada. She works in paper, ceramics, tea and experimental book formats through an interdisciplinary arts and publishing space, Teh Studio. She started putting her writing work out into the public in 2014 and then, a year later, she started an arts collective and literary magazine in Toronto. It was in this arts collective that she wrote her first grants. Then, in 2017, she began working in cultural festivals:
“I applied for marketing - they offered me the director position instead. And so I got my first real sense of like, Oh, actually, the director does the same stuff that I do in the collective. The scale is different, or you have different kinds of uppers - like upper management or whatever - but actually the scope is the same type of work.”
From here, Gui joined Regent Park Film Festival, a free festival in a low-income neighbourhood in Toronto. She was a last-minute replacement in the Operations Team and described the experience as ‘a parachute situation’. However, when you’re thrown in the deep end, you definitely take away a lot of learning, and this was the case for Gui. From 2018 onwards she worked at the largest Asian diasporic film festival in Canada, the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, first as a producer and then as a programmer. Her goal is always to bring as wide a range of talent as possible to the table; who you choose to centre is important when you are the biggest festival in that field in the country.
Fast forward to 2021 and Gui began her PhD at York University. It was here, as well as moving into a special projects capacity at the Reel Asian Festival, where she felt the convergence of her skill sets and disciplines:
“I published an anthology, (re)Rites of Passage, for the festival and that’s when these convergences started happening with my own freelance work in writing and editing and making books - because that's my art practice, book making, paper cutting. So there's a lot of these arcs around the anthology where I really brought in this separate set of skills that I had from the collective work and from my own art practice.”
It's the second anthology to exist in Canada that features Asian diasporic media creators and aligns nicely with Gui’s PhD, which centres on Book materiality.
“It's on Zines. I'm a post-colonial scholar. So it's thinking about political publishing specifically through Independent art, zines and newsletter formats. They tend to lean towards political and educational angles because that is my background and what I'm interested in. I'm interested in archives, interested in memory, interested in building long-term political muscle in the Asian community.”
Being a festival programmer, a writer, an artist, a scholar - it’s a lot! I asked Gui what she considers her ‘primary’ career path to be:
“I'm actually officially considered an interdisciplinary scholar and an interdisciplinary artist within the Canadian system which is really interesting as granting bodies don’t consider me a writer. Whereas, I had never considered myself anything other than a writer. My relationship with language is the strongest out of all the art forms.”
This love of language is reflected in the artwork that Gui enjoys. A piece that impacted her in particular is by Mexican Canadian artist, Rafael Lozano Hemmer (and nephew of the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz). Named ‘Volute’, this piece, in Gui’s words, encapsulates the core of her art practice. It's a 3D print of a speech bubble of the first recording of human speech - the phrase ‘Au clair de la lune’. So that speech bubble is the shape of that phrase made spatial. Seeing this piece was the first time it occurred to Gui that language has volume and, from there, she started to think about words in this form.
Her own work also shows an ease of movement between different forms. One of her poem installations, “resurgent artefacts” featured a large text vinyl of the poem on a white wall, and interpretations of her poem on large (eight foot by three foot) paper pieces hanging from the ceiling around a shower speaker broadcasting recordings of the poem, featuring the voices of Gui and two other collaborators, out of sync. Everyone is reciting at their own pace. The beauty of the shower speaker is that it directs sound in one direction so it comes down directly onto the listener and creates the feeling that the voices are coming from inside their own chest. Gui describes the work as ‘creating anxiety’:
“I like to solicit feedback. So when my friends visit the installation I'm always asking; What was it like? A lot of people say they couldn't stand under that shower for a very long time because it made [them] really anxious or feel really uncomfortable. They feel like we were talking inside their body. “resurgent artefacts” reflects a current synthesis stage where I'm able to begin in language but then move outward to a more bodied engagement with language. I don't just want the reader on the page. I still do that work and I think it's an amazing medium, but I think I really come alive when people have to walk into the poem. I’m trying to create a certain effect. So it's very designed. It's not like a free-for-all space where you can feel whatever you want - I'm making you go somewhere and I like that. I like that because of the resistance to that coercion or that willingness to follow. They all become part of that conversation that I think language can do and indeed does do in the privacy of our own homes when we’re reading. But I love it now that it's a public space where you're not alone. I like to just hang out at the gallery and see random people interact with it - see who dares to step into the portal space alone, see how much time they spend there, do people want to touch the work, or do they not because you're not allowed to? You can see people really wanting to do that. So they'll lean in really close or some people are very afraid and they'll just avoid it because they don't want to accidentally ruin it or something. To me that gratification of seeing that direct response to my work is so nice. Like performance art in that you get feedback in real time. I like how visceral those reactions can be. Which is why I am in the interdisciplinary space. For me it's the best place to be in because it doesn't restrict me from spending time with any medium. Whatever I do will feed back itself into a new way of thinking about how I want my art to interact with the world and that to me is the most mesmerising part of the artistic process.”
And this artistic process is evident in all of Gui’s work. She brings elements of each discipline to interact with others and create something new and exciting, whether that be programming at a film festival or as a tea sommelier (I know, I didn’t know that existed either!). Navigating a multi-hyphen career, particularly when you add in intense periods of study or job pivots, can be difficult. When I asked Gui how she switches between roles, and also switches off entirely, she had a lot to say!
“People wonder about the continuous output: I think what it is actually is that I'm a relatively premeditated person in the sense that I would consider myself a slower more intentional type of mover. If you think about the career that I have, I spend a pretty long time thinking about where I want to go and then I don't put a lot of weight on the success of that going - I think I'm more interested in trying to go there. If I take the PhD as an example, I finished my masters in 2016 and I started my PhD in 2021, so there's a five-year gap there. In those five years, a lot of people asked if I was going to do a PhD because I was an English Masters and you don't really do an English masters unless you're going to do an English PhD. But when I was doing the English masters, I had no interest in pursuing a PhD at that point. I was really just interested in gaining theoretical access and theoretical knowledge so that I could bring different kinds of resources and rigour to my grassroots work. Because you get access to libraries, you get access to professors and new curriculums and so that was really why I went to do my masters. After that, I really spent all that five years just doing what I considered more rigorous theoretical inquiry, but within a grassroots context within the arts industry, but then every year I would look at programs and then just feel it up. Like, ‘Oh am I interested? Do I want to go back?’ and there wasn't really a rush for me to do it. Even to this day I don't think I need the PhD, but what I really wanted around 2020 was a bit of a break: I was tired. The PhD, the structure of it, seemed like it would offer me some room to breathe in terms of working speed. When you work at a festival, it’s high intensity. It's very fast and then it all gets condensed into just like two weeks. But of course, those two weeks are like the peak of a mountain and then you have to ascend and descend that mountain and I did that for six years in a row. This is my seventh year working in festivals. So pivoting to the PhD was really my answer to that because I needed some padding in my life so I could slow down and spend a bit more time just doing one or two things. It really did open up a lot of room for me because there's baseline funding now. And the one thing about school is that it moves at a snail's pace - like school is just really the slowest place. When you come from a place like the arts industry or even just an intense work environment and you don't really realise that until you leave school then it’s ‘oh wait, actually school is really chill’.”
Well, we hope that Gui has the opportunity to relax a little for sure, but we also can’t wait to see what exciting and intriguing projects she thinks up next!
Thanks for speaking with us, Jasmine!
