Houston’s Cindy Shung went from Webster city worker to promising artist
Her first solo show, ‘Mind Is Universe,’ a collection of recent photos and mixed-media works, opens Sept. 24 at the Jung Center of Houston
“It’s a mess!” says Houston artist Cindy Shung as she surveys her beloved front and backyard garden, which over the course of the summer has weathered weeks of record temperatures and drought and periods of heavy rainfall.
While a collection of potted roses in the back have nearly shriveled up and are ready to be cut back or replaced entirely, out front, a thorny tangle of long-branched climbing roses stretch like tendrils up near the top of Shung’s porch.
At 67, and standing barely 5 feet tall, Shung is happy to handle chore of caring for this unruly garden mostly on her own, as it is what her good friend curator Cindy Lisica describes as “a celebration of the magic reality of life.” It is also the source material for Shung’s beautiful and mysterious photographs, sometimes mounted on watercolor paintings bursting with complementary colors and realized on handmade, fibrous paper, thin as a butterfly’s wing, yet too strong to tear with one’s bare hands.
Shung’s first solo show, “Mind Is Universe,” a collection of recent photos and mixed-media works, opens Sept. 24 at the Jung Center of Houston. Shung first picked up a digital camera in 2009, a transitional period in between her divorce in 2005 and retirement in 2019 from a career as a geographic information systems specialist for the city of Webster. Once she started taking pictures, she found she couldn’t stop.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Shung was discouraged early on from making art and instead majored in agricultural chemistry, later earning master’s degrees in biochemistry and computer science. But while working for the city of Webster, she learned how to use Photoshop, the photo editing software that would become a painterly tool in her photographic practice.
In 2014, still new to art of photography and how best to present her work to a critical audience, Shung summoned up the courage to bring a portfolio of her work to be reviewed at the FotoFest Biennial.
“I was so naive,” laughs Shung. “I had my photos printed at Costco!”
The reviewers were ambivalent about her work, which, unlike photojournalism or portrait photography, explored the tenuous line between realism and abstraction, but she did receive one helpful bit of advice.
“They said you have to take photos of things that really matter to you,” says Shung.
She immediately thought of her garden and began taking close-up photos of the roses, capturing not only the colors but light as it appears from within the petals of a flower.
“I started seeing things,” says Shung.
In 2019, at the Houston Center for Photography, Shung met a kindred spirit in the form of Lisica, who had been invited to review portfolios of HCP members.
“There was such imagination and joy behind it,” says Lisica of Shung’s photographs. “Shung’s work is vibrant, colorful and abstract, with a haziness that makes the images seem dream-like.” Lisica, whose mother was born in China and grew up in Taiwan, bonded with Shung as they discussed their heritage, Chinese names and zodiac signs.
Shortly after that serendipitous meeting, Lisica relocated from Houston, where she ran Cindy Lisica Gallery for four years, to Savannah, Ga., to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design. As Shung’s work gained the attention of prestigious Houston curators and collectors through juried exhibitions and publications, the two remained in touch, and when the opportunity to show at the Jung Center presented itself, Shung asked Lisica to curate the exhbit.
As a primarily self-taught artist with “a lifetime of experience to integrate into her work,” Shung’s enthusiasm for discovering new worlds within the petals of a rose or a pool of water touched by a drop of pigment is inspiring, as is her acceptance of multiple and dissimilar interpretations of her illusive images.
“My interpretation is based on my background, memory and philosophy,” says Shung. “That’s why I call the show ‘Mind Is Universe.’ Because everybody’s universe is different.”