JASON PHU: My name's Jason Phu and my practice I'd say medium wise is a range of mediums. So, I studied printmaking... so I do printmaking, etching, woodcut, lithography but also I do drawing and painting. I do Chinese painting which is water colour on rice paper. I do installation and lately, I've been doing a bit of performance and video so a bit of everything. Whatever suits the task at hand I guess. NAVA: What are the main challenges you've experienced in your arts career? JASON: The main challenges I've experienced in my career? Probably getting up every day and being an artist and I think it's important for artists to be constantly failing in a sense and trying new things and experimenting and that can be hard because it's a constant unknown. It's constantly putting yourself out there sort of naked, metaphorically or sometimes not metaphorically. Just building a sustainable career and understanding that as a young artist that I've had a lot of successes but often these things dry up so sort of trying to figure out how to economically be sustainable in my career. NAVA:Describe some of your significant international or national experiences. What have they enabled you to achieve? JASON: When I went to live in China for two years in Chongqing and was really able to interact with a lot of the artists and see how, you know, people work differently because it is really different in different countries - how people work even from a basic economic point of view. I travel twice a year to Chiang Mai to make prints with a friend. Nationally, it's been, you know, working at the big institutions like working with Artspace for the fellowship last year was very exciting, getting the commission from West Space last year as well. It was really exciting and really challenging but forced me to, you know, work to a bigger budget. I'm in a group show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales right now and I think I mentioned before the Primavera coming up as well but, yeah, working with these big institutions, it's exciting because, yeah, there's a lot higher risk I feel but, yeah, the challenge is sometimes what keep me going. NAVA:What does art mean to you? JASON: For my artwork and not everyone else's artwork, my work has been, well, storytelling as a person of colour but understanding why that's important and not any less valuable than a work about materiality. And I think, unfortunately, even though there is this limelight and trend to showcase this storytelling, it's often done with like patting a dog's head like, oh, 'isn't that cute' sort of thing. So I think it's this post-enlightenment mentality of the Other as this interesting, exotic thing. It means to me telling a story that not everyone can connect to, but people who don't have these voices to connect to, can connect to, yeah.