Impossible Doesn't Exist For Children
At just nine years old, Jayden Ju is captivating the art world with his relentless imagination. Working mostly with acrylic paint and paint markers on canvases almost twice his size, Jayden builds dense, bright, and unruly worlds that remind us how wild and wondrous life can be. Fresh off a ski-trip, I was fortunate enough to interview him about his work.
His paintings are full of creatures, monsters, animals, fire, skiing, strange bodies, and landscapes that have no beginning or end. His ideas sprawl out onto the canvas and multiply as the stories reveal themselves to him. Sometimes it can take a few months for a full transmission to download onto the canvas. Sometimes, just a week. When I asked if drawing on large canvases ever scares him, he barely shrugs at the thought. "No, it's not scary," he says. "It was just hard at first."
Then it became easier.
Then, apparently, it became too small.
"I'm going to make one much bigger," he throws out casually.
This is the kind of courage and confidence adults envy in children. Because there's no rule imposed on his work, there's no definition for "too big." Bigger is just more room for his painting to finish holding the idea he has in mind.
His Paintings Discover Themselves as He Works
During our conversation, Jayden sat in his living room with two recent pieces behind him. Of course, I was curious about the context behind them. What are they about? Where did the idea come from? What does it mean? He doesn't allow my inquiries to pressure him into giving answers he doesn't have. He says simply, "The names are really based on the stories inside." One painting he explains was called something like "Hollow in the Fire" because the monster burned everything it could find and became hollow in its own body. What a brutal, but cinematic logic. It's like if Hayao Miyazaki, Pokémon, and a Nat Geo special fused in a world made from a pack of markers.
Jayden's Parents Stopped Trying to Predict the Outcome
Most of his work begins directly on the surface he's creating on. First he outlines, then we see details emerge, then color, and finally, new life. His mom, Yan Gao, has learned to watch him work without pretending she knows where any of it is heading next. "Whenever I see that he's finished the outline, I cannot even tell what it is," she says. "I cannot even imagine what the result is going to be." Yan and Jayden's father aren't artists, she tells me. They are, in her words, more inside-the-box thinkers. At the beginning, when Jayden was really young and they were stuck at home during COVID, they gave him paper and pens to keep him busy while they worked remotely. For a while, he drew only tanks. A whole year of just tanks. Then he wanted more materials, greater size, more creatures, more room to work, more space to express himself.
"My imagination has limits," Yan laughs. "But Jayden? His has no limits. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what he's going to make next. But it is always cool to see."
When I asked where Jayden where he would go if he could go anywhere to create, he didn't say Paris, Tokyo, or the greatest city in the world, New York. "Another Universe," he tells me with the straightest face. He tells me he wants to go to another universe. He wants to see other signs of life. We talked about lightspeed and discoveries beyond lightspeed. He has no limit to his imagination, and his mom doesn't try to impose one.
Childlike Imagination Can Be Contagious
As adults, we tend to force constraints where there are none in an attempt at creating some false sense of security or control. But Yan seems to relish the fact that she has none of that when it comes to Jayden's art. Watching Jayden over the years has even changed her own sense of what her future can look like or who she's allowed to be. She said she once thought very narrowly about career, life, and the future. Since recording Jayden's work for Instagram, and creating reels that have gone viral, it's taught her how to tell stories creatively and opened doors for her own imagination that she never expected to walk through.
The brilliance of a child at play or expressing the way they see things uninhibited is in our ability as adults to be loosened by it; we're reminded there's another way to look at and experience things.
When Jayden was asked what advice he'd give other artists, the depth of his response was apparent in its brevity and exactness.
"Don't copy others," he said. "Just draw what you like."
And you know what, I can think of worst ways to live.
The paintings featured throughout this story are by artist Jayden Ju and are reproduced courtesy of the artist and his family. This story is the first feature in Residence Supply's Power of Imagination campaign.
