Artist Spotlight #3: Elwing Sương Gonzalez
LA-based artist sketches facial expressions to illuminate on the internalized trauma and healing process within oneself, history, and society at large.
Elwing Sương Gonzalez is a Vietnamese-American teacher, artist, and author based in Los Angeles.
Better known as “elwingbling” on Instagram, she has been making art since she was a child, before she even started going to school.
She began posting her artwork on Instagram in 2014, and developed her signature drawing and word hybrid-style two years later.
She is also a self-published writer and illustrator of three books, It's All Within, A Year of Lifelong Grief, and Ways to Stop Killing Your Soul, where she explores the different sides of the self-healing and introspection — from internalized trauma, relationship issues, to her personal grief after the loss of her mother.
Apart from her artistic pursuits, she is a full-time middle school and community college history teacher, and a mother to three kids.
Pixelated Revolution: In general, how would you describe your work and your aim as an artist?
Elwing: I’ve always produced artwork, and I’m a teacher as well, and so I kind of melded those things together. I started posting artwork just kind of as an outlet for myself as I was going through a healing process. I was going through divorce, as I went through the frustrations of teaching. And I've been teaching in public schools for 16 years. And I've seen the political waves, the changes, and so many things that I say fall on deaf ears until it becomes the trend, or until some parent complains. And so that kind of frustration of having done this anti-racist curriculum, pro-black curriculum, and having had resistance to that, until it fits the political climate, those kinds of things, I would just express in drawings. And then I was in graduate school while I was teaching too. And so there's that in academia too. It was just an outlet for all of that.
What issues in the world today do you care most about?
In all of my teaching and all the curriculum that I've written, I'm always focused on power dynamics and systemic inequalities. The goal for my teaching more than anything is for students to kind of pan out and see the structural elements at play that they don't really often see, to see their own position in this structure that they often don't see. But, also, to give them value and weight, and to humanize voices that are often marginalized and excluded from history. I've always taught in predominantly immigrant Title I, students of color kind of population schools. And so, that goal of making education inclusive, but even more than that, just making education non-traumatic, because it is so traumatic to so many kids in so many ways.
In the classroom, in terms of the content of the curriculum, there's systemic factors like how students are punished, how they're tracked, inequalities, those kinds of things. So I've always tried to just make my classroom a place where the students could just breathe and learn something. It’s been something that's gone with me throughout my career, of always asking the question: What are we grading? And I never get an answer. Nobody ever wants to talk about it, but what are we grading? Are we grading from their starting point, and how can we grade students all the same? There's all this rhetoric of like, oh, we want to grade their growth. Growth mindset. But there's no realistic way that can happen with the class sizes that we have, lack of resources, and the reality that there still is a very capitalist-centric kind of system for producing labor. It's not really about personal growth or individual growth. It's all of those questions nobody ever wants to address it in a faculty meeting. It's too big, like who can grapple with that? And so, my artwork has been an outlet for that too.
What do you think Instagram brings to the table that other social media outlets don’t necessarily have? There's the obvious, it’s a primarily visual platform. But is there anything else you can add as to why Instagram is effective for visual artists like you?
I think all the platforms are effective, but I think it really depends on age, it’s a big factor. When people think of who's on Facebook, or who's on Snapchat, TikTok, it's very much dictated by age. I have three kids, they're teenagers, and they're like, oh, you know, what are you a 40 year old Facebook mom? I'm like, well am I a 40 year old mom. But, you know, it's like, there's a certain idea of Karens, and certain types of memes.
I mean, I see a lot of the artists that I follow and I’m impacted by, and they're on Facebook as well. And it really is just strange, just wherever you happen to get in and develop a following is where you end up staying. Because I developed this huge following on Instagram, just transfer to Facebook. I don't know what it is, other than just people, maybe my age, but then a lot of my followers are in their twenties too. So I don't know. It's a mystery.
Do you have any specific artistic inspirations, and how do they show up in your work?
I'm pressed for time because I have three kids, and teach in two different institutions, but I have these ideas and I need to get them out. I used to paint a lot, and all my paintings are all around my house, and they're just stacked in my room. Especially once I had a bunch of kids, I just couldn't paint anymore. It was just too much to set it all up. I don't have a studio or anything. It's just my dining room table and my bed to set it all up, and to do the layers. It's too frustrating for me. So I just mostly sketch with pen and ink, and then write my words of my thoughts around it, because I can get them out quickly. And a lot of times, I'll just see something on Instagram, or on the news, or on Facebook even, and it just sparked something in me where I need to get it out.
Your art on Instagram are usually drawings of facial reactions. Sometimes you draw the eyes, nose, and the mouth. It all depends. And then you have your words around it. How would you describe that? Where does specific style come from, and how important is the relationship between the graphics that you make and the words that you put around it?
I'm a very facially expressive person. My sister used to call me her own personal comedian, because of the faces I make. My husband too will get upset with me sometimes. Cause he's like, I can tell you're not happy by your face. And I'm like, no, I'm just listening to you. I guess that's what I tune into is the expression I would have in relation to whatever I'm feeling, whether it be anguish, or skepticism, or peace, or whatever it is. And then I'm very in tune with other people's facial expressions too. And it's another thing where I'm like, look this person feels like this or that. And my husband's like, no, how can you even tell? I just feel in tune, even though I'm just projecting, but I do feel like I can read people's faces really well.
Where else do you get the information for your posts?
I'm an avid reader, and going through graduate school, and then just my own reading, I’m like why don't more people know about this. I'm a teacher too, so I want people to get this information.
So there's all the political stuff. Sometimes I'm just making a drawing with text about the history of the word white in American law. Here's a digestible format. You can get a little history lesson here, which is why I like those like text pages too.
I also share a lot of healing, trauma, and grief because I've been working on that for 15 years of healing my own abuse, trauma, and wounds from my childhood. I lost my mom three years ago, and just doing the artwork to express my grief.
Ultimately, when I talk about my political stuff, I get down to the center of it. It is a lot of trauma. A lot of fear and a lot of unhealed wounds from those who are on all sides of everything. Those who are complicit, those who are the aggressors, those who are the victims. There's just so much fear, grief, and trauma that needs to be healed.
And just reading about things, hearing stories, I just want to share, like, look, you could do this. You can do this and just not carry this burden around anymore. You could just know this and not blame this group of people anymore. The goal is getting people to get a little closer to some peace inside themselves. They're not out there inflicting wounds on other people, and rehashing their own traumas over and over again, being stuck in a world of confusion. I've been in all those places myself, you know?
What impression or impact do you hope your work leaves its audience?
I understand how learning works. Most of the time, I don't see the payoff in my students, especially my young students. They're like, why did we learn this? And then, once in a while, some kids will come back at an open house and be like, oh my God, I learned so much. Or sometimes people will email me, I'm going to go to school to become a teacher because of you. And it made it all worth it. One out of every 500 students will come back. But even if they don't recognize it, I created some building blocks somewhere inside that some next experience or bit of information could build upon. Because I know I reflect on my education. There's so many people that are vivid in my mind and I remember this person saying this or that. To me, it always stuck with me. They'll never know that they had that impact on me. And I can only hope that I have that kind of impact. I won't see it come to fruition or anything, but that's okay. Just throw the seeds out there and that's all you can do. We can't force growth and learning on people.
Do you have a favorite post or a favorite art piece that you’ve made?
I think for me, the ones where it was something I just learned. One that stands out to me, and I got so much response to, was a few years ago when I first started learning about the idea of fatphobia and thin privilege. I just wrote a post like fatphobia is real, thin privilege exists. And I posted that, and just the amount of ridicule I received, people reposting it and just talking a bunch of shit on it.
But it really took a lot inside of me to just let it go. Maybe a year or two down the line, you'll get some other information or this will become more mainstream. And it has, there's so many people who do this work in eating disorders, and fatphobia, and internalized fatphobia. All of that. I'm just walking in their very large shadow, but maybe my little post readied the soil for those other things in the future.
Have you seen your work have an impact outside of the social media platforms that you've used?
I don't know if it's outside of social media, but I just self published some books that kind of got popular. I don't know what popular is, not like Amazon popular or anything, but a good amount of people wrote to me about what they read in the books, and how it just helped people on their personal journeys of healing from their trauma. Other than the fact that what I put on social media is what I teach in classes too, not even just the historical content, but the social justice elements of it. And the interpersonal healing and growth stuff, it all comes from my regular work with actual human beings in real life. I just translate those into this visual format, so it can be transmitted out to people I don't know personally. So I don't know if it goes in the direction of Instagram to real life. It's more like from real life to Instagram.
What do you think your responsibility is as an activist-driven digital artist in the age of social media?
One major responsibility I think is giving credit. That's a big one, because obviously all my ideas don't come from myself. I mean, I process things that I learn on my own or with all the tools that I've developed over time from other people. But if I'm inspired directly from something I just saw, it's important to me to give credit to that person. So much of my learning has come from Black thinkers, Black activists, Black artists and creatives. And, obviously, there's a huge issue of appropriation, of lack of recognition, of lack of payment for the labor. So that's always something I'm always on the lookout for, am I benefiting in a way that's based on my privileges? Am I taking that opportunity for somebody else?
And then, almost all the money that I earned from any of my artwork, my books, everything, it goes back into community activism efforts that center around Black and indigenous people. It's something close to home for me too, undocumented communities as well.
What is your personal take on the current relationship of social media, art, and activism, and how it's going to progress in the future?
It's interesting because I love social media, and not in the sense that I use it that much. I love it because I can see how many worlds it's opened up for people. People who are physically isolated, whether by their geographic location, or because of ability, or segregation, whatever has kept people away from the community.
This is so much access, and I can see people who have been alone, people who are alone in their identity, in their trauma, in their desires, don't feel so alone. Of course, there's always a performative aspect of social media, but there's a performative aspect of getting dressed, of interacting with anybody anywhere.
And it's not like social media is not a human creation. It's a human creation. So it's going to carry all of the things that we as human beings produce in our humanity, just into a digital route.
Like when are we not performing, the majority of our life is performance. Especially if you have a job, especially if you have children, then you have to perform. You can't just be however you feel all the time. And so, when I think of social media, people really just want to express themselves. And sometimes people within themselves are at a superficial level, and have not reached into who they really are. And so they're going to express that superficial level that they're at. Some people are going to be deeper and they're just like, I just want to say this because I need to release into the world, or I just need to find somebody to understand what I'm saying.
There's just such a human quality of wanting to be heard and understood. And whether it be in a book, or a magazine, or in a photograph, or on a canvas, how is this any different?
Those are all human things. They're not inherently bad, but they do need to be examined. Like, why do you want to wear luxury clothing that costs so much money? Examine that. Why do you want to post a picture of yourself and your perfect family? Examine that. Why do you want to post your black square right now? I think that's the most difficult thing, people are really afraid of having to look at themselves. They're afraid of the mistakes they've made. They're afraid of the performances they've put on in the past and being ashamed of that. And that's something I try to put across in my work too, is all your feelings, all the things you've been, all the people you've been, all the performances you've done, they're all human. They're all you. And they're all everybody else. Nothing you live or experience is novel.
Do you have any ongoing upcoming projects that you'd like to share?
I have an Etsy page. I don't think anything on there is over $20. Most of my prints, I just make photograph prints of them so that they're available for $3, just so people can have those things. People just want reminders sometimes in their homes, or they want decorations for the rooms. And I'm fine with that. I know especially when you're first starting, there's that thing in the back of your head of like, will people think less of me if I don't put a higher price tag, am I not really a valuable artist?
But I just want my work to be accessible. It's why it's free on Instagram and then it's there. I have some books that I self publish. And then I have a Patreon.
Do you have any activist driven resources, events, or initiatives you want us to know about?
I can just mention the efforts that I support the most, both financially, and in terms of broadcasting it in my stories.
Just locally in Los Angeles, there are efforts working with the homeless population. Her handle is @beauty2thestreetz, Shirley Raines. She was actually just featured on an episode of United Shades of America. She works in the skid row population, giving haircuts and giving out makeup, but also, food clothing, other supplies.
On the national level, The National Bailout. They bail out people in jail, but especially during Mother's Day, they try to bail out Black mothers from jail.
And then, a lot of efforts in indigenous populations, like the Navajo Nation. DigDeep is an effort to raise money to get indoor plumbing to a lot of people in the Navajo reservation.
And then, at the border, I support three organizations, Border Angels, Border Kindness, and Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas.
To support Elwing, you can follow her on Instagram, purchase her prints on Etsy, or subscribe to her Patreon to receive exclusive content of her work. You can also purchase her books, It's All Within, A Year of Lifelong Grief, and Ways to Stop Killing Your Soul.
You can also directly donate to her Venmo, Cash App, or PayPal.
Pixelated Revolution is a bi-weekly newsletter that features the graphic designers and illustrators of color behind some of the most engaging and viral activist-driven graphics on social media that touches upon issues of systemic oppression, race, gender, and sexuality politics.
The newsletter is created and edited by Margaret Guzman, an arts and culture journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New York City.
For activist-minded artists who want to be featured, we would love to interview you. Just email me at mmg591@nyu.edu
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