Finding a new calling while on an art walk at the Getty Center June 8th, 2019

10 years ago God called me into full-time ministry. Now he made it clear that He calls me out of it. And the longing in my heart, deep down below the self-doubt and insecurity, was to spend this next chapter of my life making art and telling stories. But because of all that self-doubt and insecurity, I knew that I needed to hear God’s calling for me.

So I decided to do an art walk. I would take 3 hours and walk around the Getty by myself and try to seek God’s voice.

Although it sounds easy, starting off was hard. I haven’t had a lot of solitude recently (life with two kids), and so I was out of practice. But I was still hesitant, and it wasn’t just because google maps said it would take 45 minutes to go the 10 miles down to the Getty. I was hesitant because, even though God has spoken to me so many times, I was worried that (a) He wouldn’t say what I wanted or (b) He wouldn’t say anything at all. Even after so many trials, there’s still that fear.

But I told my wife I was going to go (yay, accountability). So I went down. And instead of taking the freeway, google maps had me go through Sherman Oaks and Mulholland. As I drove I saw all these houses. Houses I would never live in, even if I had the money. This thought occurred to me: these objects of desire for so many are not my desires. It was comforting to know I knew myself in that way.

When I got to the Getty, I put on my headphones and started listening to the audiobook for “Art & Fear” by David Bayles and Ted Orland. There was a lot of great stuff in there, but you can read it for yourself. I told myself I’d take an hour to just walk around and let my mind and heart settle. I got one of those tour guide iPod touches. As I listened to some pieces that interested me, I just spent some time in thought.

Of course I loved the artwork from the Netherlands during and after Rembrandt. I’m starting to grow a fondness for Italian Romanticism. But overall, nothing was really standing out to me in the first few wings. I loved a lot of the Christian iconography, but something wasn’t resonating. Even the Rembrandt that they have didn’t really pop for me.

So I went to lunch, and as I sat I just began mulling over where my life has come. The last time I had really contemplated my identity as an artist was when I decided to become a pastor 10 years ago. Since then I’ve gotten married and had two children. I’ve had my entire friendship circle change maybe two or three times. I’ve gone through so many mentors, and pastors, and students. Before being an artist felt like a goal to be accomplished. And the pressure therefore of the art was not in the craft or the work, but in the result. One quote from the book stuck out to me “Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.” — Stephen DeStaebler.

Then I walked down to the garden, sat on a step, and began to pray. In a recent podcast (2018’s season of Startup “church planting”), I heard about a meditation method that goes through “I want…, I fear…, I surrender…”. As I was filling it out I realized how many of my wants were countered by one of my fears. I want fame and recognition without pressure. I want power without responsibility. I want risk without consequence. I want to find my voice without receiving hatred and persecution (and white nationalist online trolls). I want to tell stories without fear of being irrelevant and poor. I want relevance without inadequacy. And I saw in myself those two things from that quote. The pain of working is to confront all of those fears. So the question is whether the pain of not working, never getting to express those things, was greater.

But what did I surrender? I wasn’t sure yet.

So I did another exercise another friend (shout out to Shun Lee Fong over at Greenhouse productions. https://www.greenhouseproductions.com/), taught me. He was telling me about calling. And how calling is the overlap of three venn diagram circles: 1) your strengths and gifts (2) your passions (3) your dreams and plans.

So I started writing out my strengths (which for an Asian-American is really hard to do). I think I’m good at story telling. I’m good at writing. I’ve learned to be clear and concise and hold complex ideas together. I love one-on-one communication and psychoanalysis (as anyone who’s done counseling with me can attest to how annoying that can be). I’m witty (maybe even funny). All these strengths that used to fit into my ministry and now do not.

My passions? Art and film. My brother told me recently that he used to see my eyes sparkle when I talked about ministry. But that in the last year he only saw it when I talked about movies. And right now Asian-American advocacy.

And as I was praying those things God asked me a question. “How come church wasn’t on this list?” Now don’t get me wrong. I love Jesus, I love the church, I love the Bible. But I’ve been taught and have often taught that our faith is not one of many priorities. Our faith is integral to every priority. But I realized in that moment that at this moment, my passion is not the church (physical and local, lower-case c). Or even in the kind of bible reading I’ve done. My passion was in how the Gospel comes through in art, and vice versa. How the Word of God influences the words of people and characters. I am passionate about God, but that passion is being focused into art.

So what of my dreams and plans? I’ve always been a dreamer and a planner. But for some reason I was stuck here. I have plans for making movies and telling stories, though I don’t know if they succeed. But then I wrote down the word “family”. I realized how profound that was. How for so much of my life, my dreams weren’t about my career. They were about my family. Even in ministry, I’ve done so much not as “a pastor”, as if it were my job. But because I saw ANC as my family. My happiest moments are when I feel the most close with my family. And one of my biggest fears is losing that for the sake of a career, any career.

I remember once listening to an interview with Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 hours, 28 days later, Sunshine my personal favorite). In that interview he talked about being divorced and not spending much time with his kids. And his off-handedly remarked that it was just the cost of his work. That’s my biggest fear. My entire ministry life the past 10 years, I have always kept one thing in mind. My success as a pastor was about having a life worth following. “Imitate me as I imitate Christ” 1 Corinthians 11:1. I have loved the fact that being a good husband and father were tied to the my success as a pastor. I am afraid that going into the work of an artist, I may find success in that career only to lose the success in the dream I have most: my family.

But that’s a lie. Family and career are not one OR the other. My wife has been speaking the Gospel truth in this for awhile. Ministry isn’t the only career that can also fulfill the call of family. Perhaps I have not really understood that as deeply as I ought. In fact I think to live life to the fullest we need Jesus to transform both and both together.

So what do I surrender? I think I need to surrender my pessimism. My own negativity. Many people who know me might be surprised to hear me describe myself that way. When it comes to a lot of things, I’m super optimistic and positive. But one of the reasons I am is because I am so pessimistic and negative about myself. Yet if that’s who I see myself as, then as an artist is that how I see my work? An idea from the book that I was reminded of was…

God spoke this to me “you do not exist as an artist because the work exists. The work will exist because you as an artist already exist”.

In fact, if God is the original artist then we see Him create a beautiful world, not to define his own beauty, but to reflect it.

I am afraid of making art because I am worried I will fail at making someone else’s art.

[Spoiler Alert for Endgame]

When Thor’s mother, Frigga, tells him “everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be. The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are.” I was shook. I genuinely felt that God was speaking that to me (also helped by the fact that I watched it the night before I told my church students I was stepping down).

Shun asked me before what was stopping me from being an artist. Because it didn’t seem like it was any practical obstacles. He asked me a powerful question as another Asian-American. “Who are you asking for permission?”. Growing up Asian-American I felt like I needed permission for everything. Even when I went to college I had a hard time not asking if I could go and use the bathroom. In white culture there’s a proverb: “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission”. Such a privileged position to have.

So what is the Gospel truth? Not a reckless abandon. The truth is not that we do not need permission. The truth is that in Christ, God gives us permission to be who He has made and remade us to be. And if that is an artist then we do not need to BECOME artists, we need merely to receive His Grace and be.

I surrender my permission.

So about two hours have past now. I get up and go to see more art.

I begin walking towards the west wing. And there’s a spot that’s on the walkway on the bottom of this picture:

As I walked by it, I thought I heard God’s voice say “I have something to show you”.

And like most times God’s trying to talk to me, I doubted it and thought it was my own voice. But coming to hear God was the whole reason I was here.

So as I walked in, I prayed and said, “okay. What are you going to show me?”

He responded, “you’ll know it when you see it, it’ll stop you”

Typical God response.

But it’s what I had wanted. Cause about a month ago I went to San Diego and while randomly walking through the Timken museum I had randomly been stopped by this painting from John F. Peto. http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/in-the-library/

It was the first time in a long time that a painting just stopped me in my tracks and pulled me in. But I didn’t have the time to really reflect then. A part of me had been searching for that feeling by coming to the Getty.

The floor of the level didn’t have much, but the basement level had a photography exhibit. Most of it was taken up with the work of Oscar Rejlander which while I appreciated, didn’t really move me. But at the back of the gallery was a section titled “Encore: Reenactment in Contemporary Photography”.

And one of the collections was from artist Qiu Zhijie, and featured Chinese teens from the 1990s dressing up in western business attire and posing in traditional communist propaganda poster poses. There’s a sample at: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/photo_reenactment/index.html?mhp-rotator=1

And I was stopped. Here was people who looked like me and who were dressed like my dad used to dress when I was a kid. And it felt so familiar and at the same time so foreign.

I sat down and wrote down this thought: “I see myself as a foreigner”.

I realized that throughout the entire museum I had seen so much European art. And I appreciated the artistry and the craft. But the only ones that had drawn me in were the ones of still life or landscapes. Because they were the only ones that looked at a world like I would see it. As I saw white people walking past the photographs, one couple aptly said “I don’t get it.”

I wonder if through all the European art, white people just think “oh yeah, that looks like me”. Probably not. They probably don’t even think about it for a second. Yet every piece of European art to me is at the same time familiar and foreign. I hadn’t thought that maybe I see myself the same way. Familiar and yet foreign.

I’m caught in a moment of Asian-American identity. Struggling with being the hyphen. And it’s why being an artist is so hard. Because if art is the expression of the artist, what does it say that the artist sees himself as a perpetual foreigner.

Deep, but not quite what I felt God was trying to say.

So I walked up to see the impressionists. Cause I love impressionism. The Getty has one of Monet’s cathedrals and Wheatstacks and one of Van Gogh’s irises. All of which I have loved in the past. Yet I walked through and didn’t really feel anything. I was surprised.

Cause at this point I thought I had seen every exhibit. So I was like “God, I thought you wanted to stop me with something.” But as I walked out a saw one last room off to the side. It was European art after 1850. So basically “too contemporary to care”.

At first, poking my head in, I didn’t see much that interested me. Then in the corner I saw this.

It stopped me. It just did.

Then I saw that it was by Edvard Munch and it was called “Starry Night”.

If you don’t know, Munch is Norwegian. And when I was 22 and right out of college, I went on a trip with my dad to Norway, Amsterdam, and Paris. I thought I would love Amsterdam and Paris the most. But my favorite city in that whole trip was actually Oslo. And the two things I loved most in Oslo was the Vigeland sculpture park and the museum that featured the work of Edvard Munch. It was one of the times that I most felt like an artist in my life.

Now here I am at 32. And seeing a painting by Edvard Munch.

So much raced through my heart and mind. What is he seeing? And how could he leave so much undone? In person, you see the brushstrokes and the seeming recklessness. The title is clearly a reference to Van Gogh and yet in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” the stars are so prominent and emphasized. Here the stars look like afterthought. Little flecks of white.

The fence as a hole. The mountain, if it is a mountain, has a dripping streak of white that is…what? A water fall? A light shining?

Then I listen to the museum tour ipod. And Munch painted it when he was 30–32. When he had just fallen out of love and felt like his life was changing.

I asked the docent to tell me a bit about it. He couldn’t tell me much about the painting itself but he told me that Munch, as a Norwegian, had always found success in Norway. But because he was Norwegian, and art was seen a the territory of France and Italy, nobody really regarded him outside of his own country. It felt like he was talking about me.

He also said that compared to a lot of Munch’s work, this piece was clearly unfinished or rushed. But because Munch always thought he was dying or on the verge of psychological breakdown, he painted fast because he wanted to do more.

I’ve been sitting on a short film since last summer. Not wanting to show it because I see all the ways in which I wanted it to be better.

Munch probably thought the same thing about this. Yet he moved on because there was more work to do. And in the end, for me 100+ years later, it was his imperfections that moved me. It was the fact that it was unfinished that resonated with me.

It was the rush that was often the genius. It was not taking too much time to criticize yourself, but to just make what he had been called to make. The ambiguity for me sprang out of the specificity for Munch. And the ambiguity for me became a kind of specificity for me.

In Art & Fear, here’s another few passages that resonated with me.

God has made me an artist. It’s who I am. Therefore it’s how I think. And the calling is to be an artist and to do the work of an artist. But just like my sermons, I consider my audience but the audience is not my work.

I walked out and as I passed the same spot where earlier God had spoken, I felt the breeze. And God speaking in the breeze, “I give you permission to be who I have made you to be”. But it was cold so I went inside.

I walked through the exhibits again, but now seeing them different. The European work IS foreign to me. But that’s why I see them differently from a European-American. Yet those artists were simply working with the tools they were given to express the world as they saw it.

The Chinese artist was using the tools that he was given to express the world as he saw it and as he wanted to see it.

And Munch…well Munch was probably insane. But his insanity was himself.

So I walked out again and went to the same spot.

10 years ago at the end of three hours of prayer, I asked God if he wanted me to be a pastor at ANC. And I heard him say “go”. And then I asked Him again and again He said “go”. And I asked Him a third time and He told me “do I have to tell you again?” in a sarcastic loving way.

So here I was, the third time passing this spot. And I asked him “can I be an artist?” And He told me in a sarcastic loving way, “just go already!”

So that’s my call.