Collapse Into Light: Featured Artist Elijah Chong | Ian & Falyn | 4-2025
Born in Anchorage, Alaska, raised in Houston, Texas, Elijah Kane Chong left home to study Architecture at Texas A&M University, which is where he dedicated himself to the arts and specifically to painting. He then moved on to New Orleans to teach art and establish his career in the post-Katrina revival. There, he met up with like-minded friends and established the Krewe of Motha Roux, an independent collective of far-out creatives and freethinkers. He rededicated himself to art as service, and journeyed to Santa Fe to study Art Therapy and Counseling at Southwestern College. He currently works as a licensed mental health counselor and art therapist in Santa Fe, NM and continues to expand and grow upon his practice and body of work.
Elijah Chong
How do you approach teaching art therapy to children? What's unique about their creativity, and how do you encourage their artistic expression?
My practice as an art therapist and counselor thus far has primarily focused on working with adults, however many aspects of my practice would transfer directly to working with children, while some would change. The one constant aspect of my art therapy practice is creating a safe space for creative expression to flourish. To do this, I hold a strict policy of practicing non-judgement and non-attachment. Non-judgement could also be reframed as practicing acceptance; we accept the image as is, as we accept our thoughts and feelings that arise in the image making process. Judgements would be thoughts or feelings expressed as good or bad, right or wrong, like or dislike. Instead we practice observation and curiosity; ‘I see you used a lot of red in your image, can you tell me more about what that color means to you?’
Art therapy, being a therapeutic practice that developed out from under the umbrella of psychology, has borrowed from many psychological theories and stances. In my own practice, I like to incorporate gestalt, positive psychology, and transpersonal psychology into my therapeutic approach. If I were to be working with children, I would likely adopt the Expressive Therapies Continuum, which is a therapeutic stance that was developed in the context of art therapy, without being a projection of a psychological stance onto art therapy. It is based on the belief that art making is a fundamental inherit need and that metaverbal processing is a powerful tool for growth healing. The therapeutic process involves moving between three interconnected spectra of Kinesthetic/Sensory, Perceptual/Affective, and Cognitive/Symbolic.
Children are innately curious, creative, and expressive, I’ve seen this in my daughter. However, most people in their lifetime will experience what we call the ‘art wound’, which is receiving the message that art making is a foolish and wasteful endeavor. The Expressive Therapies Continuum, I think, models the natural progression and development of children’s creative expression, and can help anyone at any age develop a practice of self-expression that is meaningful, impactful, and personal.
Collapse Into Light
Your website showcases your artistic progression through different phases, like "Preformative" and "Transformative." What's your creative process like, and how has your style evolved over time?
My own creative practice is process focused, meaning that the creative process is primary, and the final product, or artifact, is secondary. My process now is procedural, algorithmic, meaning that it is driven by a cycle of repeated sequences, with each iteration of the cycle a culmination of all the iterations before. I've long held an interest in the recursive nature of reality, and my creative process is a reflection of this. I've labeled this phase as ‘Transformative’ to one, highlight the gradual changes that result from this process, and two, in purely critical terms highlight the emergent quality of the formal elements in their relation to each other and the gestalt.
The labeling of past phases was a retrospective act. If I can identify a ‘golden thread’ of evolution through the phases, it may be a preference for exploring the abstract and subjective aspects of our loved experience. What I've labeled as my preformative phase is highly influenced by the abstract expressionism movement, and the process was action-reaction oriented. The ‘Formative’ phase marks a departure from or growth out of the influence of abstract expressionism and an intention to develop a style that was uniquely mine. Gestural strokes evolved into automatic mark making and asemic writing. There developed an interest in layering and interplay of elements, and expressive abstraction evolves into abstract symbolism. This evolution furthered in the ‘Processional’ phase, in which the compositions become more organized, and which you start to see the emergence of mandala-like structures organized around a central point. This is where I began to incorporate a recursive process in my work, and, because I was teaching art at the time, returned to an emphasis on the formal elements and principles of design. The 'Intentional’ phase marks a deeper emphasis on the spiritual aspect of my practice, with each piece being a focused meditation on a spiritual concept. The recursive process became a vehicle for encoding a set intention, and engaging with each artifact therefore became a means of accessing that energy. The current phase of my work began with the culmination of my graduate program. It is a distillation of the recursive process, and an ongoing investigation into naturally occurring algorithmical number patterns.
Concrescent Morphogenesis
You say the mission of the Artist is to communicate. What messages or emotions do you aim to convey through your artwork?
This of course has evolved and changed over time, from piece to piece. However, I do feel there has been some common themes that I explore throughout. In no particular order, these include: the immediacy of experience, the mysteries of life and death, spirituality and moral philosophy, love and connectivity, and, most prominently, the experience of relationships, at the human level as well as microcosmic, cosmic, and macrocosmic scales.
When I say ‘communicate’, other adjacent words could be ‘express’ or ‘connect’.
Communication is the transfer of information, which I use synonymously with energy, and the artifact becomes this vehicle of energy which can connect people. I think, for me, but maybe for most artists, it’s this connection that drives us. I can look back at each painting I’ve ever made and know exactly where I was at that time and place in my life, emotionally, spiritually, philosophically, what events I was going through. Each piece becomes an energetic snapshot in a way. And, if someone were to come along and see and feel the piece and relate to it and connect with it, then that’s a profound moment. What we are talking about here is metaverbal communication, communication beyond words, because the thing being communicated is ineffable. It can be felt, experienced at an emotional, psychological level, but not verbalized.
I consider my artwork as spiritual in the sense that the creative process is a process of creating meaning. The creative process, for me, is a form of processing and creating meaning out of the events and experiences of my life. The process is meditative, introspective, and because of this, there is another communication taking place, a communication with the self. The self provides the meaning but only when the mind is clear.
I don’t shy away from pain and suffering, but lean into it and utilize the creative process as a means of transmuting or sublimating it into something beautiful, relatable, understandable. If my work evokes anything at all emotionally in the viewer, whatever it may be, then it is a successful piece.
Born Within Their Natal Cloud
With over 30 exhibitions in various locations, you've had remarkable opportunities. How do you secure these exhibitions, and do you have a favorite place where your work has been displayed?
For me, opportunities have risen both organically, being in the right place at the right time, having the right conversation with the right person, etc. as well as through persistent effort, applying to open calls, grants, sending my portfolio to galleries, etc. For every door that has opened, there have been many more closed. Faith and perseverance are strengths. Believe in yourself and your work, and build relationships with those who believe in you as well. Also, some of these opportunities were self made, grass roots efforts, a collaboration of artists coming together to exhibit their work. Easily, my favorite exhibitions were of this nature, with the Krewe of Motha Roux in New Orleans, and I truly credit those experiences as being a time of tremendous growth and development artistically.
Can you walk us through the process of channeling a piece of art? Do you have a routine to get into your creative flow, or does inspiration strike spontaneously?
I can't say that I've ever gone into a work with a vision in mind. Again, in practicing non-attachment to outcomes, there has always been a high degree of spontaneity in my work. Currently, my process has become more rigid and structured. It involves starting with an idea, an investigation. In reality each piece is the next step in a larger ongoing investigation, and with an emphasis on recursion, each new piece literally begins where the last piece left off. The process begins with preparation, which means stretching and preparing the canvas. I have always preferred working on raw, unprimed canvas, so preparing the canvas means taking the final color arrived at in the previous painting, diluting it, and using it to lay down several layers of a wash as a foundation. Then I create what I call the architecture of the painting, an underlying framework, or path. Then, the actual painting begins, starting with a single point of color, and growing outwards using the architecture as a guide. I mix color gradually, using a mathematical algorithm, and each successive iteration or layer contains within it all the layers before it. From there, I just follow the algorithm and trust in the process. I have no inkling where it will go or what the final image will be.
Set And Setting Polaris
Many of your works, like "Unified Polarity Field" and "Pentacle of the Twin Flame Lovers," evoke spiritual and religious themes. How do you come up with these evocative titles?
Many of the titles are references to religious and spiritual texts, philosophical concepts, literary works, mythological figures, astronomical and subatomic phenomena, etc. I like to think of the titles as a lid on a box, with a label that describes the contents of the box. But a lid is also an occlusion, it hides the content, and the title is sort of a puzzle or key to help the viewer open and understand what is held within. At one point I had a running list of title ideas that I would pull and choose from, but now the titles come to me in the midst of the creative process. As the process unfolds, and as I in turn process the events of my life and come to understand the meaning of the work, that’s when the titles arise spontaneously.
As a father, how has parenthood influenced your artistic vision and approach?
Becoming a parent has greatly changed me, as I'm sure many a parent can attest. The major change is a shift in priorities and perspective. In many ways your world is not your own anymore, and your main focus which drives every action is raising a safe, healthy, and thriving child. Five out of the last seven paintings I've done have been meditations on the miracle of life from conception, to womb, to birth, inspired by the experience of becoming a parent. Many of the lessons I have gained from my art practice are directly transferable to parenting. Parenting takes infinite wells of trust, patience, endurance, perseverance, presence, attentiveness, tolerance, and most of all acceptance. When these skills are in practice, you gain the opportunity to witness a beautiful, amazing, bright human being develop and unfold before your very eyes.
Initiation Of The Green Flame
Elijah Chong
