Artist And Mother

A tiny excerpt from a conversation between Nina Buesing and Andrea Chung that got interrupted by Andrea's 10 year old son, Kingston (Part 2)

Andrea Chung

In Nina Buesing’s interview with Andrea Chung, the two talk about art and inspiration and touch upon motherhood. Even though she deals with heavy topics of colonialism, ancestry, residue of tourism among other things, Ms. Chung proclaims at one moment in the interview that she does art for her son Kingston. Motherhood inspired her, changed her, and Ms. Chung found a new purpose in everything she creates.

And yet for many women from different fields of art, to become a mother is still a hard choice to make, we are warned against it, and there is a fear of rejection. One is easily forgotten while getting adjusted to motherhood, and ideas and creations often for years disappear from the post-pregnancy brains. Tiredness, survival of the baby and ones own survival overtake without money to acquire help. It takes years at times to come back, it takes years to regain the confidence, and find new connections.

“There was Marina Abramovic, who in a 2016 interview with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel explained that she’d had three abortions because children would be “a disaster for my work.” And Tracey Emin, who said in a 2014 interview, “There are good artists who have children. Of course there are. They are called men.” - Mata Atman, “Why Do WE Make it So Hard For Artist Moms to Flourish,”
New York Times, May 26th, 2021

The fact that I am writing this as my last post for 2022, and not a Christmas-y article says a lot, but when I listened to Nina Buesing’s conversation with Andrea Chung, at one point the artist’s son Kingston ran into the room. In a world where artists, especially women, are still afraid of becoming parents, in fear that they will be rejected by the art world, this is a wonderful reminder that motherhood and artistic work can coexist.

We cut out this part of the interview last week in order to solely focus on Andrea Chung as an artist. But I knew that without the “real life” parts, we don’t get the whole picture of the artist. The lines between motherhood and creating blurred in this interview, and we shouldn’t be afraid to share the fact that children exist in our lives, or in that lieu, woman shouldn’t be afraid of their age, or to admit that they are in relationships, and they should not be judged for it. They should also not be judged if they don’t decide to have children or marry. We should accept all the different seasons in our lives and experiences; the fact that we are multi-faceted individuals makes our life experience rich. And as we leave 2022, and enter 2023, we should learn to respect that.

What follows is an excerpt of the interview interrupted by Kingston.

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