DIGITAL WORLD-BUILDING WITH ARTIST KENING ZHU

The writer and visual artist schools us on the four "stuck project" categories, and reveals their alchemical art practice basics☁️

THE 16 CREATIVE ARCHETYPES, DECODED

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Kening Zhu is a digital world-builder and medium-agnostic artist.

KENING’S DIVERGENT CREATIVE STRATEGIES: ACTION/INACTION

• Train for inspiration. Part of tending to your artistry is acknowledging its preferences — it loves a quiet, foggy morning for deep journal writing; it needs at least 20 minutes of vigorous walking to get going; it requires a specific pen on hand to sketch with — but it’s equally important to study your preferences and iterate on your practice. Kening softens into her creative tendencies, but systematizes her processes so she can reliable drop into her “inspired” zone.

• Perhaps being a multi-platform marketing expert is not necessary to present your work to the world. Kening has a pretty tight lifecycle for her work — she dreams it up, creates it, publishes it on her site, and then sends it out to her email audience. No Instagram. No TikTok. No Youtube. And it works out! What a relief to know that you don’t need to be a 2024 digital Don Draper to sell people on your work.

• Get curious about what’s “blocking” you. Kening has four categories of creative constipation — sometimes its a “you” problem, sometimes its a Universe problem. If you can pinpoint why you’re feeling stuck, as opposed to just throwing up your hands and cursing the gods for your inspiration blindness, you’ll (obviously) beat the heat more quickly. Kening’s categories are: (a) I’ve put too much pressure on it to bring me some tangible result (b) I’ve waited too long and the expiration date has passed (aka, it’s stale and kinda dead; the creative energy has left). (c) It’s premature, and I’m rushing it. (d) I’ve blocked it in some emotional/spiritual way

What’s your metaphorical Adderall — something that slingshots you into an inspired creative tornado of action?

Kening’s creative immersion cards at work

Some days I’ll wake up and my mind is more juicy/alive/fertile than others — and the tornado comes on its own, like I can feel the wind gusts in my head, and the windows of my psyche shaking (in a good way). New ideas and impulses fly to me, and I have to sit and write them all down, and then make a plan for executing them. On those days, I feel more like a passive observer-vessel of the tornado, than anything.

On days when I don’t feel it, I still sit down to sense into / listen to the creative impulses, and jot them down. I call this process “deposition.” Sure, those days don’t feel as exciting, but it definitely keeps the relationship with the tornado alive. (actually, for me it’s more like tsunami-fire.)

As for action: I think my metaphorical Adderall is not one thing — but a time-space-portal-zone I decide to enter. A mood. A kind of psychic creative weather, and I’m the weather-sorceress. There are things that make this weather more possible, of course. I have specific windows of time (before sunrise, twilight + nights, mid-mornings). I like to work in two extremes: a deep sprints (1-3 days lost in one project), or daily rituals (25-55 minutes). I consider it: tending to a garden vs. riding a storm.

I have tools that make this easier. I made these creative immersion cards for the purpose of deep dives into creative wormholes (and subsequent recovery from amnesia).

On the other extreme, I’ve also been experimenting with haptic wearable alarms (I got a Fitbit for this purpose), which I’ll set to 12 or 25 minutes. There’s something about deadlines (even measured in minutes) that give my Aries moon the burst of adrenaline-fire it so dearly craves. I’m pretty process obsessed, so I like to repeat and refine. In the end, this means that I’ve trained my psyche to summon inspired creative tornados at will, anytime.

I like to work in two extremes: a deep sprints (1-3 days lost in one project), or daily rituals (25-55 minutes). I consider it: tending to a garden vs. riding a storm.

What idea or concept are you chewing on? Has it shown up in your work yet?

by Kening Zhu

Recently, I’ve been writing a lot on my visions for digital world-building, and the internet as a creative practice — concepts I’ve been chewing on for many, many years. I see the internet (and thus, websites) as somewhere between an infinity vessel-portals, a house, a world-universe, a dream, and a public mirror of my mind-consciousness.

For the longest time, I did web design work to support my art, but in the last years, I started to see websites as an art FORM, in itself — except it’s both the vessel and the medium — not unlike canvases, or blank pages, or paintbrushes, except that it’s nonlinear, modular, non-hierarchical (hyperlinked / literally, webbed). Thus, the internet (or the website) is like a master form to hold all forms (hence, why I say, like consciousness).

For years, I’ve been wanting to create several hybrid “books” in the form of a website — something which interweaves all of my mediums (writing, visual art, animation, web and interaction design, audio) to tell non-linear, narrative stories. When I’m not busy doing guide-work, client-work, or building my ecosystem, this experimental book-website-form is my Big Simmering Pot — what I’m most craving to manifest.

How particular are you about your notebooks? Pens? What do you write in and with?

Very.

Leuchtturm 1917 (Hardcover, A5, Blank Pages) — I use this notebook for work journaling, ideas & insights, and creative depositions. My inspired tornado/tsunami/fire-storms either go here, or into my spatial synthesia vessels, my creative immersion deck, or on singular A4 sheets of printer paper, which I may or may not tear up into pieces and rearrange).

Pens — currently, I use a Uniball Signo DX (0.38) for most writing, and a Staedtler Pigment Liner (1.0) for big writing and drawing. I also write with 2B and 3B drawing pencils.

For non-work life journaling (though the boundaries on this are dubious), I choose my journals one at a time, very, very carefully — to reflect the particular life season I’m in. Currently, my season is this Ginkgo Pop Valmer by Common Modern, which I bought at Goods for the Study in Manhattan.

I see the internet (and thus, websites) as somewhere between an infinity vessel-portals, a house, a world-universe, a dream, and a public mirror of my mind-consciousness.

What was going through your mind when you first decided to share your work?

I can barely remember, but probably so much creative constipation that it was causing me existential pain. Over the years, sharing my work has oscillated between feeling like:

(a) extreme nakedness / too exposed

(b) speaking to the void and

(c) a very satisfying exhale

These days, I mostly live in (b) and (c); though new challenges (for example, the recent launch of my podcast) still does make me feel (a) at times.

What’s your media diet, at present?

I’m slowly coming out of years of media fasting / low consumption mode (not counting music), and still finding my rhythm. But currently, I’m enjoying Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change (while pulling a card a day). Hoping to get past the halfway point of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård. The last TV show I really, deeply savored was True Detective (Season 1).

To be creative and to make things in 2024 is objectively difficult. You have to square off with distractions, global anarchy, and perpetual haunting of the existential question: “why bother?” What keeps you coming back to the ring?

by Kening Zhu

I’ve never once asked myself, “why bother making art?” but I have asked myself, on several occasions, “why bother being alive — when humanity sucks blah blah, and we’re all going to die anyway, in a blink of the universe’s eye.”

The answer is Art. By Art I don’t mean the end Product — stuff to hang in museums, to collect awards with, or cash, or reputation, or likes. I mean creation as a pure Process. You make things in order to see life, to digest life, to make meaning, truth, and beauty out of the confusion, meaninglessness, and chaos of it all.

In the process, you might connect to another human being — a stranger you don’t know, but who will find you because they recognize you. To make art is to alchemize life. For me, it’s a compulsion and craving of the spirit — I’d be miserable otherwise.

The answer is Art. By Art I don’t mean the end Product — stuff to hang in museums, to collect awards with, or cash, or reputation, or likes. I mean creation as a pure Process. […] To make art is to alchemize life.

John Cage was inspired to develop his practice of composing via random chance and chaos after reading a book about the Chinese divining practice, The I-Ching. What influences or inspiration from outside of your field or profession have made the biggest impact on your work or process?

I’m an obsessive nerd when it comes to esoteric systems of spirituality (astrology, tarot, human design, gene keys, matrix of destiny), as well as psychology (Jungian) and mythology (Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Joseph Campbell). The more I learn about each system, the more doors and portals I seem to unlock within myself. They have given me so much permission to BE myself, to embrace my idiosyncrasies, to access my own wisdom, and to swim in the juicy parts of my subterranean life.

When I was 8 years old, I checked out a book from the public library about astral projection — and laid in my bed and tried to do it. I didn’t succeed. But these days, I’ve found that the work (inner work, spiritual work, shadow work) really DOES work!

What do you do “wrong” that makes your work successful?

You’re told, as an artist or entrepreneur, that to be successful you have to keep putting yourself “out there” and reach out to people, network, build relationships, apply for opportunities, grants, or whatever — to basically compete for attention, and wait to be picked up and noticed.

But I’m an introverted hermit with extreme obstinance, and a strong aversion for external structures of power or authority (really, anything “out there”). I’m not on social media, bad at emails, and can easily go days without talking to anyone.

I realize that everything I’ve been doing over these last years comes from asking, “What can I do such that I can avoid “putting myself out there” — and instead, leave trails for the right people to come to me?”

How can I wait in the cave, rather than go out into the crowded places to hunter-gather, and feel the need to compete for attention?

My answer is creation — in all forms, art or ideas — shared in my infinity vessel of a website. I never put myself “out there.” (and I don’t really consider my website “out there,” it’s my magical cave, so it’s more like an “in here”).

This is how my ethos and philosophies for digital world-building was born, and this is how the right people always find me. I allow myself and my work to be the magnet.

I realize that everything I’ve been doing over these last years comes from asking, “What can I do such that I can avoid “putting myself out there” — and instead, leave trails for the right people to come to me?”

You’ve been working on something and it just isn’t coming through the way you’d like — do you kill your darlings and scrap the whole thing? Do you compost the idea? Do you file it away in your cabinet of misfit concepts to review later?

by Kening Zhu

In instances when creative projects aren’t working for me, it’s usually because of a few reasons:

(a) I’ve put too much pressure on it to bring me some tangible result
(b) I’ve waited too long and the expiration date has passed (aka, it’s stale and kinda dead; the creative energy has left).
(c) It’s premature, and I’m rushing it.
(d) I’ve blocked it in some emotional/spiritual way.

If (a) or (b), I file it away and let it hibernate, trusting that if it wants to reborn, it WILL come back in a different (or same) reincarnation. The things worth birthing won’t leave me alone.

If (c), then I wait. If (d), I then do some deep journaling and excavation work.

What’s a weird superstition you subscribe to?

I love magic, but I’m not at all superstitious. Probably because I believe in magic as a form of personal power, and superstitions diminish my sense of agency.

(a) I’ve put too much pressure on it to bring me some tangible result
(b) I’ve waited too long and the expiration date has passed (aka, it’s stale and kinda dead; the creative energy has left).
(c) It’s premature, and I’m rushing it.
(d) I’ve blocked it in some emotional/spiritual way.

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