Black Stories/16: Moses Sun

Moses Sun:
I would say the main thing is you’ve got to work on having an open heart. Protect your heart, but open it up so your mind, body, and soul can all align, and that will help you start listening to your instincts.

Justin James Lopez:
Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of Amazon’s Black Stories where we highlight the stories of Black designers, researchers, and creative minds from all around the world. I’m your host, Justin James Lopez, and today I’m joined by Moses Sun, where we discuss the importance of keeping an open heart, leaning into ambiguity, and trusting your own instincts. Now let’s hear his story. Well again, thanks, Moses, for joining me today and agreeing to join me today. I know you’ve got a lot going on with your work at Amazon and just broadly with your gallery. But for the listeners here, I wanted to just give you an opportunity to introduce yourself and introduce the work that you do.

Moses Sun:
My name is Moses Sun. I’m a interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary artist. I work in everything from collaborations with communities to studio work to large-scale murals to working with my art collective I’m a co-founder of, the Vivid Matter Collective, and I really seek to, in much of my work, which is mixed medium, meaning mixing in the analog, like drawing and painting, with the digital painting and drawing and sometimes animation and that sort of thing, I really seek to connect diasporas of the world that have always really inspired me or held me close or provided comfort, wisdom when, I would say, the European diaspora would turn its back on me when it was done with me. It was much more transactional, less communal, I would say. And that would be a lot of just talking about just being a Black person in America and working in different atmospheres, working in different places where you think you’re friends, and then when you’re no longer working there, you just drop off.

Justin James Lopez:
You almost learn what the relationship really is, right?

Moses Sun:
True, true, true. But those true relationships, those true bonds, they last over time. So there’s people of all sorts from all different backgrounds that I’ve continued to be able to talk to, rely on, collaborate with, congregate, conversation, what have you. So I just look at it over time and see the people that have stayed around, and it’s a real variety of folks, not just stayed around but been engaged.

Justin James Lopez:
I get that. What’s interesting is our relationship is interesting from an origin point perspective because in my work here at Amazon, I actually told a story about you about a year ago, about the work that you did. And we’ll jump into a few of these things, but specifically it started with me seeing the partnership that you had with Amazon as a freelance artist, working with Amazon on the Black Is Remarkable campaign for Black History Month. I didn’t actually talk to you about that story. It was really more about the partnership at a high level. And there’s different reasons for that, for sure, but that story ended up coming out. And then I was lucky enough to meet you later and build more of that background and the true relationship. But when we talk about that partnership as an artist, how did that even happen when it comes to working on the Black Is Remarkable campaign?

Moses Sun:
So this goes back to relationships. This goes back to a friend from college who now has his own ad agency called Shay Creative based in New York. He hit me up around, maybe it was October, could have been November. He says, “Hey, you want to get in on this Amazon Black History Month?” And all I thought to myself, “They’re kind of late. They’re kind of late.” That was just my automatic feeling. I was like, good but kind of late. But I was like, “Okay.” I was like, “Yeah, sure. You’re my boy. I trust you.” I was ready to interrogate because I was just like, “Okay, who else is Black that’s working on this campaign?” Blah, blah blah. Blase, blase. And then next thing you know they’re like, “Oh, well actually, you don’t have to worry about that because Amazon wants to work directly with you.” And I was like, “Word. Okay, cool.” And so I get in contact with the cross team, cross media team or something like that.

Justin James Lopez:
Oh yeah, I know what you’re talking about, the group that handles all of the external partnerships for these things. Because I actually worked with them for a few features because it’s not just Black History Month that they do it, right?

Moses Sun:
Yeah.

Justin James Lopez:
I think it’s important to call out, so that people don’t start to be like, “What?” They do it for different events across the year. They work with local artists or just general artists, because one of them wasn’t local at all, actually. But they work with different artists, freelance artists or just artists from agencies or different agencies from across the world to partner with revamping the website for different purposes throughout the year, Black History being one of them. And-

Moses Sun:
Latino History Month.

Justin James Lopez:
Pride Month was another as well.

Moses Sun:
Yeah, Pride Month because the example they gave me was they showed me a profile they had done for Latino history.

Justin James Lopez:
That was another one as well.

Moses Sun:
And so I was like, “All right, cool.” I worked over the winter holiday. I don’t usually work during winter holidays. I usually put everything down. But this was just, I don’t know, my spirit just really moved me. I was like, okay, this is important. It’s bigger than me, and it’s also I was doing what they call these aura portraits of people. I was doing original artwork, and then I was doing handmade texts. So it was three different components that required a lot of discipline and thought. And fortunately they were able to give me some color palettes and things of that nature. But what was wild was that how it went from the East Coast all the way down to Miami and then back to Seattle for me to just work with them in Seattle, and that the work had already been presented earlier as a Vivid Matter Collective. And then I had actually met Galen during the protest in 2020, when I was painting the Black Lives Matter mural, and I was painting the letter M. I had actually met him then.

Justin James Lopez:
Nice.

Moses Sun:
Didn’t remember because I had met so many people, and it was such a intense place to be, painting in the middle of protests, teach-ins, all this stuff that was going on all at one time. So it all came full circle. And so I was very grateful for that and just took a chance. I was like, I don’t know how it’s going to be to work on something like this because is pretty much more commercial driven, but it was a real pleasure. We really got on well. We worked well as a group and a team. I felt very collaborative.

Justin James Lopez:
As an artist that’s relieving to hear, especially working with a big corporation. You never want to feel like you’re just doing what they tell you. You have some type of autonomy to bring your insight and your vision to life. And it sounds like that’s what you really got from that experience, at a high level at least.

Moses Sun:
Oh yeah, for sure.

Justin James Lopez:
When it comes to the next step in the journey, when we actually met in person, so I’m walking by your studio now at Amazon for the time. In one of the buildings, I’m not going to name the exact building, I walk by your studio. I see you, and you know what? I’m going to be honest. The first thought that went through my mind of, oh, you’ve got to tell him that you wrote a story about him, and you’ve got to be okay with however he feels about it. Literally in my head I was like, you’ve got to be okay with however he feels about it because you didn’t speak to him about it. And you were super cool about it. And this was when you were working with the Expressions Lab, which is something that’s separate from that previous project that you were working on.

Moses Sun:
Oh yeah.

Justin James Lopez:
Maybe tell us a little bit about the Expressions Lab, whatever you can tell us, and how did you get plugged into that?

Moses Sun:
Well, the Expressions Lab, there’s actually two, and one is for the employees of Amazon. So you don’t know about this, employees. So you have an entire lab, and that lab is actually an art studio full of all sorts of everything that you could ever want from paint to materials like collage materials to whatever you need. And there’s workshops. It’s really cool. So it’s right across from the Amazon Artist Residency Expressions Lab. And so my lab is really, it’s a studio here in Seattle, and there’s another one that’s in Bellevue. And there’s a cohort of, I can’t remember how many people whose proposals are accepted every year. But I originally had written a proposal year before, and I didn’t get in. And then I said, “Well, what I need to do is get more specific.”

So I really thought about the way I was writing it and thought about how I could localize it. I started thinking about the history of Seattle and people that I knew and specifically how I was getting history from Takiyah Ward, who is four generations family, Black African-American family here in Seattle. So I was fascinated, and I was like, well, there’s my key right there. So I wrote my whole proposal about that and creating these things called diaspora portals. That got me in. And then they were like, “When do you want?” I said, “I need it at the end of the year,” because I knew I had some other things planned. So I was able to come in this year, and it’s just been really amazing because I’ve been working on diaspora portals, but then I’ve been working on a bunch of other things too because of just the state of things in the sense of I’ve entered into this flow state.

So when I walk into here, I just kind of flow from one thing to the next. And that’s actually the name of my closing show is Flow State. And it’s the acceptance of what is, what is in the moment versus instead of going with that flow, maybe they’re like, oh, they start beating themselves up about, oh, this didn’t turn out the way I want it, or I don’t know how to do this, or oh, I need to learn this but I’m intimidated, or whatever. It’s just like, no, let’s just go with the flow.

And the funny thing about how, Justin, you were talking about how you wrote about me without meeting me. So Barry Johnson, who was in the residency before I was in the same room, that’s how we met. So Barry, he wrote a review of some art I was showing at Wa Na Wari a number of years ago. I think I reached out to him, but we didn’t really connect. And then COVID hit, and then we had started connecting, and then we would do these virtual studio talks where we were literally just on the phone on FaceTime doing studio talks.

And then we ended up meeting in 2020 at the protest. Literally, he’s down at the E. I’m the M. He chose E for his daughter. I chose M for my dad. And we literally looked at each other for the first time and just aid, “What’s up?” And then just put our heads down and started working. When we talked, and we were like, yeah, I read about you. I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s dope. It’s so good to meet you.” Because it’s like so many times you don’t get to meet the people that are behind the scenes and helping you shine because he really helped me shine quite a bit. And my family was really proud. Wow, you’re really out here making this art work for you.

Justin James Lopez:
I think it’s powerful, especially coming from a space where you, and we can jump into a little bit more about your background and your journey with your artistic journey, but just understanding that there’s different roles that people can play, and there’s different avenues that people can take when it comes to what success looks like in the creative space. Your journey in collaborating with different major corporations, but being able to do it where you can own your creative space is something that’s unique when it comes to how we collaborate with big business. Because usually that’s not the thing that we do. We come in. We’re in-house, and then we work on the products the way that they want us to work on it. But you take a different approach, and I think that that’s really valuable. So when we think about that journey for you, where did art come into your life? We’re taking you way back, right?

Moses Sun:
Consciously, I remember drawing, but I remember distinctly my granny, my great-grandmother, asking me what I wanted to be when I grow up. And I was four or five years old. And I was like, “I want to be an artist.” And then I said, “and a fireman,” because for some reason I knew I didn’t really want to be a fireman. I just threw that in because I played with toys that had firemen. But I think I just really wanted to be an artist, but somehow I knew that was not the thing. That’s not all you could be. You always had to have this duplicity. So even at the age of five, I understood that. That’s society doing its thing.

Justin James Lopez:
For sure. We didn’t really have arts programs where I was growing up, so if I were to have said that, everyone would have been like, “Oh, so you want to be homeless and alone.” And that’s what that really means in a space where it’s not valued. And when you think about your journey, how did you go from I want to be an artist and fireman to, you know what, let’s drop this other thing that makes the statement more tasteful and let me just go with what I really want to do? Where was that shift in your mind?

Moses Sun:
That shift occurred when I was at the University of North Carolina School of Arts, their high school summer program. I had previously been deeply involved in politics. I was a real political nerd from the age of 13 to about 18, 19 years old. I was in Teen Democrats. My dad had given me my first camera, so I was photographing everything. And by the way, my dad didn’t give me a simple point and shoot. He gave me a full-on manual camera I was not prepared at the age of 13 to deal with. So I had to make some really big errors and shed a few tears about underexposed film before the good grace of my neighbors taught me how to use my camera. Because I wasn’t one to read manuals. I always had to learn tactically.

And so I’m at this summer session in North Carolina in Winston-Salem, and I’m just really serious. My teachers are serious. I was doing sculpture. I get a call from my friend, Jerry, and he’s like, “Hey, do you want to be a runner at the Democratic convention?” I was like, “Yeah.” He goes, “Okay. Well, you’ve got to get down here. Let me know, and we’ll make arrangements so you can come down and be a runner.” And I knew what that meant in the political sense. I’d already started my political career, but being a runner was basically going to be I would meet everybody that I was going to need to meet in order to be a politician. But I was also deep into art and self-expression and deconstructing power and speaking truth to power. So I have these dichotomies going on.

So I’m thinking like, okay, cool, I’ve got a couple of more weeks left. I’m doing well at school. I’ve got auditions coming up. So I go to my teachers and I say, “Hey, I just got this call. I have this opportunity to be a runner at the Democratic convention,” blah, blah, blah. And I said, “Oh, could I audition early?” And my teachers just looked at me dead-ass and said, “No.” Just that there was not even a fake. I was like, “Wait, wait. No?” I was like, “But how could you say no when this is a great opportunity and I’m doing well here, and this is part of this whole thing of this is all good stuff? This is all I’m achieving.” But they were just like, “No, we’re not going to let you in early.” And I was just like, okay.

So then I had to sleep on it. And I said, “Okay, I guess I’ll sleep on it, and I’ll make a decision.” And I slept on it and woke up the next day, and I was like, “Hey, Jerry, I’m not coming.” And that was it. That was the beginning of the end of me and my pursuit of being a politician.

Justin James Lopez:
Have you ever thought about that decision and thought that you should have made a different one?

Moses Sun:
No.

Justin James Lopez:
It’s a relieving feeling when you think about life that way. You think about these critical moments, and I don’t know that everyone always feels that way about their critical moments in life. Sometimes you’re thinking, man, my life would be completely different. But what we’re really saying in that sense, because that’s a statement that’s always true. If I did this other thing, my life would be completely different. That’s always going to be true. But what we’re really saying is my life would be a lot better if I did X. But it sounds like that’s not what you felt here. You’re like, no, I actually feel like I made the right decision in that moment.

Moses Sun:
Yeah. It was that first step in walking in my path. And I didn’t realize it, but my sister and my dad realized it. Because much later on, years later, I was talking to my sister, and she was just like, “I’m so glad that you’re making art as much as you’re making it now, because you were always happiest when you were at school.” And I was like, “What?” Because I remember that time as being, there was a bunch of personal turmoil going on with my family, and I just put all everything into my art, and I cut people off. I stopped talking to people. I was just 1,000 feet deep in it. There was no coming up for oxygen or air. It was just like I was just in it, and it was self-imposed pressure. It was pressure from being in the school, but it was also just I was very self-possessed. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but I really was. And so I would say that was the big turning point.

And then for me, I became pretty apathetic about politics in America, about the difference it could make or not. So it wasn’t until summer of 2020 and when I got that DM from Takiyah to be like, “Hey, do you want to come do some protest art on the street mural?” And I was like, “Yes.” And then when I got there, I had my PPE on. We didn’t have vaccines then or anything. So I came with my mask and PPE. I spent my last dollars on brushes and whatever I could. And then I could feel this presence that I hadn’t felt before.

And it was then I realized, oh wait a minute. My activism never went away. It just went dormant because I was so caught up in my corporate career, my corporate creative design, UX creative director, lead artist, this or that, all these titles that at the end of the day gave me lots of experiences. But as the way I would function within an organizations, I just wasn’t political, and I wasn’t always looking out for myself. I was always looking out for what’s the bigger mission of the company.

And while in corporations you really have to look out for yourself, well, for me, it fooled me into thinking that I was making progress. And I was, but I wasn’t making progress with my heart. If anything, my heart was getting more and more damaged as I continued throughout from one corporate gig to the next. And the nurturing part is really big, especially when it comes to creativity because you need time. You need buy-in. Especially when you’re working in a corporation, you need buy-in to be a autonomous problem solver, and you need to be trusted. And because I’ve worked previously in so many different industries, cool, I’m down. I never would say that in an interview, but that’s really how I approached it. I was like, oh, this is dope. I get to learn about this whole new industry I’ve never even known about, and I get to create simultaneously and build teams and do this and that. So it’s always this flexibility to go from one place to the next. But my thing was I just wasn’t a political animal within the corporation.

Justin James Lopez:
I think that that’s a part of the game. Like I mentioned before, I really do feel that because one of the things that frustrates me the most, as you put it corporate creative, is having to create this vision. And it is a bigger vision. It’s not necessarily mine. It’s something that has to bleed into business objectives and overarching high-level VP goals and all of this stuff, like organizational goals. But then you have these moments where you can impact change in certain ways, but you have to do that through this political game that’s so exhausting because we could do our jobs so much more efficiently and quickly if we just said what we actually felt and just moved on. It’s not personal. We’re just talking about the thing. Let’s move on. But you have all of these people that are really looking at it from the me, me, me, I, I, I perspective.

How do I be seen? How do I stand up? How do I stand out? Instead of really trying to develop people. And while you may develop in certain ways, that you still fall off in other ways. I recently heard this joke, and the joke was about pheasant and a bull, and they were grazing on a farm. And the pheasant, he looked up at a tree and he said, “Man, I remember a time where I could fly all the way up to the top of that tree.” And the bull said, “Well look, here’s what you could do. Every day eat just a bit of my dung, and within a fortnight you’ll be able to get up to the top of the tree.” And he’s like, “Man, that’s crazy.” And he was like, “No, it’s serious. Most of humanity is doing this, so you’ll be able to get to the top if you just do that.”

So the pheasant does this. Every day he eats just a bit, and by the end of the fortnight, he’s at the top of the tree. And as he is up there, the farmer looks up, and he sees this fat pheasant sitting on the top of a tree. So he pulls his shotgun out, shoots him down. And the moral of the story that he was talking about was that BS, it can get you to the top, but it won’t keep you there. And I think that that’s something that a lot of people, they don’t pay attention to. They don’t understand the disruptive nature of the things that they’re doing and the way that they do it. But that was a really good way to describe it, as you were describing it, when you think about the I versus we perspective.

Moses Sun:
Well, it’s also keeping your soul intact. For better or worse, there are some places you can work at that you can really keep your soul intact. And there’s other places where you’re making up for it in different ways, but your soul, it’s injured. It gets injured. Especially when it comes to creativity, the things that can influence the decision-making that so often have nothing to do with the actual brief.

Justin James Lopez:
What is your advice for people that want to focus on nurturing their soul, focusing on building that backup if it may have been damaged or it may currently be damaged in these ways existing in this space? Because you’ve jumped between worlds, from being a corporate creative to owning your own agency, being freelance, but still bouncing back and being able to work with a lot of these major corporations in your own way. What is your advice for someone that is trying to heal their soul, as you put it?

Moses Sun:
First off, travel. Travel someplace you’ve never been or travel someplace that really gives you a sense of peace. The reason I say travel, and especially travel in more places you haven’t been or that you may not know much about is because it gives you a chance to stand in your own light. Because other places you go, the first question is, what do you do?

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. Oh, man.

Moses Sun:
Other places you go, it’s like, who are you? Oh brother, where are you from? It’s all the other stuff has fallen off. Now, the money that you make from the job may have given you the tools to take the trip and the journey, but that’s one of the things is travel. I would say meditation. I always encourage people, especially creatives who do a lot of corporate client-facing work, whether they own their own agency or they’re working for somebody, I encourage everyone to do this one exercise every night.

And I say, “Draw for five minutes a night, every night, no matter what, just five minutes.” You can just do an automatic drawing or a doodle, or some people call it doodling. It starts to open up channels in your mind that you may not even know are there, or that you may have feel have gone away, but they’re still there. It’s travel, drawing, journaling and getting outside of your comfort zone and actually meeting other artists, meeting other creative people. And artist doesn’t necessarily mean visual art. Artist means if you run into that elder at the cafe who is a saxophonist, yo, get down with that brother right away. Get down and pay your respect because you will learn more in 10 minutes of conversation than you have in four years of college.

And I can attest to that. The frequency that people see you actually allows people to drop their guard because they see you. They may be watching you, they may be seeing you, you don’t even know it, but that person may connect you with this or that. Just the other day, my friend Michael came by. I had met him at Cafe Fiore, which I’ve been going to since I moved here. He got me my first gig at Microsoft, and that was just through going through the coffee shop. I always encourage people to go outside their comfort zone. Ambiguity is actually really good because it’s not necessarily there’s a right or there’s a wrong place. There’s always just like a place to go. And I thrive on ambiguity. I’m one of those people who actually loves it.

Justin James Lopez:
It sounds like it. But Moses, there’s a lot that I gained from this conversation, but also in general, just our interactions, by and large, they’ve always been really enriching. Being able to see your art in person, see you as a human and the work that you do and the vision behind it, I think that there’s a lot to be gained here and definitely a lot more than we can all talk about in this one episode. But I wanted to thank you for just joining me, and I look forward to continuing our friendship and building that out.

Moses Sun:
Oh, same here, man. I feel like we could talk for hours. There’s so much. I want to thank you for making this time and look forward to more conversations with you. Appreciate you, man, very much.

Justin James Lopez:
I appreciate you, too.

Moses Sun:
Yep.