Amplifying Asian Americans: Jeff Deng

Jeff Deng is a Chinese-American visual artist based in Queens, New York. In this piece, Jeff opens up about sharing and making money from his own work, how The Stuff of New York series unfolded, and his most recent projects.

In this monthly blog series, we highlight creative pursuits outside the music industry and by Asian American Pacific Islanders, as part of our mission in amplifying Asian Americans, or #AAA.

I’ll try not to make this a love letter, but being with someone for five years and watching them grow in their artistry and passion and agency will do that to you. 

Jeff Deng is an illustrator, maker, cartoonist, animator, baker, and more. He is the quintessential generalist in all the best ways. He loves the borough of Queens and fried foods way too much. He has the ability to come up with the most unique ways to express a viewpoint, idea, or experience. 

Born and raised in Elmhurst, New York, Jeff first learned how to draw from watching TV after school. “I didn’t have cable for a while, but on PBS’ sister channel, WLIW 21, there was a program called ‘Mark Kistler’s Imagination Station,’” he shares. “Mark Kistler’s Imagination Station” was a TV show that aired in the ‘90s, where Kistler would teach kids how to draw. “He had a lot of jokes, and it was very approachable and fun. I started copying him and when I finished, I felt really good about myself because it looked like what he drew but I did it. Since then, I would come home from school and try to watch his program and draw.”

While Jeff always loved to draw and create things, being an artist wasn’t always on the agenda. He went on to study at Connecticut College with a very clear-cut plan: major in Computer Science, land a job at Google, and the rest will work itself out. In our society, college has always stood as this section of time in your life when you are supposed to “find yourself.” But like many of us (myself included), Jeff felt out of place at college. As one of the few Asian Americans on campus, and having come from a big and diverse city, Jeff experienced culture shock, loss of direction, and depression after being thrown into a small, predominantly white campus in the suburbs. 

“From preschool to high school, it was always people of color around me. College was the first time I was surrounded by not only white people, but a different economic and cultural class. They were the ‘main American culture,’ the kind of ‘norm’ you saw on TV. It was such a big difference from where I grew up, and I don’t think I was ready to make that jump,” he tells us. “There were so many feelings of inadequacy and not belonging. I felt so out of place and depressed.” Midway through, Jeff started to find comfort and interest back in art classes and eventually graduated with a Fine Art degree. 

Photo by Hailey Savage

When I first met Jeff in 2016, he was working as an educator in the arts field. He worked at the Brooklyn Robot Foundry for three years out of college and taught kids science and electronic projects, basic circuitry, and how to build things that would light up or move. He then went on to work a few jobs as a museum educator. During that time, he was still committed to working for himself.

“The goal was always to do something hands-on, and that’s still the goal. It’s to make money working with my hands and using my creative ability. So as long as I do, it’s fulfilling.”

Since I’ve known him, Jeff is constantly working with his hands. The first project of his that he ever showed me was an armor made completely from cardboard. He has a million tools I don’t know the name of and owns three toolboxes (does a man really need three toolboxes?) and as a result, he can fix up pretty much anything. At some point each month, he can be found cleaning up his bike, experimenting with a new sourdough bread recipe, cutting his own hair, or finding a way to make something in our lives a little more efficient. 

When asked to expand on this, Jeff explains, “The goal was always to do something hands-on, and that’s still the goal. It’s to make money working with my hands and using my creative ability. So as long as I do, it’s fulfilling.” 

One of the projects that caught fire was The Stuff of New York, a series of illustrations of New York objects that is meant to capture the New York experience and one’s relationship to the city. The Stuff of New York was initially inspired by museum displays, hence the numbered “figures'' and succinct, often humorous and relatable captions. I remember the moment he thought of the idea. We were on the subway together and I’m pretty sure I was mid-sentence in a riveting story when I noticed he was not listening, lost in thought. Immediately, he took out his phone to jot down the first seeds of what became his longest and one of his most accomplished series to date, and ultimately stood as a trampoline into illustrating professionally. 

Illustration by Jeff Deng. Stuff of New York, Fig. 22.

The series has since been displayed on Link NYC across the city and as part of community pop-ups and art fairs. It has also opened the doors to selling Je'ff’s work in the form of prints, stickers, shirts, etc., as well as having the opportunity to commission art for other organizations and individuals. “There’s something really nice making something with your hands, bringing it to life, and someone seeing that and resonating with that and buying it. That’s a really good feeling,” Jeff says. He and I have often talked about how much more valuable it feels making money from our own work than anywhere else—how you can make $20 from your art versus your day job, and somehow the $20 from your art can feel like so much more. 

The Stuff of New York launched in 2018, and it has been such a joy to watch Jeff grow since then. One thing I’ve always admired is Jeff’s ability to not limit who he is or what he does. There is often pressure in any creative industry to confine yourself into one specialty or field. The classic phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” has led us to favor a one-track career path. Our world is familiar with and respects specialization in one defined lane, but that has never been and probably will never be Jeff, and he is better for it. 

He first resonated with the term “generalist” from Adam Savage (of “Mythbusters” fame), who considered himself a generalist and advocated for being a skill gatherer. Hearing this, Jeff finally felt seen. He learned that dipping his feet into many things has ultimately sharpened his skills, given him a more refined perspective of what living “fully” means, and allowed his interests to feed off each other and spread this collected knowledge into many different areas of life. He explains, “I like learning different things. Oftentimes, that leads to different phases where I’m like, ‘oh, maybe I could be a baker!’ or when I got into computers, I thought I could be a programmer. All that stuff is still interesting to me. Even in the pandemic, I got into birds a lot and I even thought, ‘is an ornithology degree worth it?’ I get obsessive about these things and I really dive into it, and then I take a lot of what I learn from those things and apply it unknowingly to the next thing I do or a problem I encounter.” 

“Being Asian American can often feel like being stuck in between,” wrote Jeff when he first published this piece in February 2021, weeks before the mass shooting in Atlanta that killed six Asian American women and two others.

Most of all, being a generalist has translated into Jeff’s art. He explains that his art process is very mixed between technology and more hands-on analog techniques. The majority of his pieces begin with pencil and paper before being scanned into Photoshop and colored or edited digitally. Once it is complete, the work is spit back out into a physical product, the way it began. The method is for artistic purposes, but also makes the process of creating more nuanced for Jeff. He says, “I like working in that way because that’s how my brain operates. It’s more interesting than sticking to one way.” 

Most recently, Jeff has been more open to expressing his identity and experience as an Asian American through his art and hopes to continue to do so. One of his most recent projects was an illustration of PAC-MAN stuck in between a black and white ghost. At the time, the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes was starting to circulate in the news (although it was still widely underreported). Jeff was also in the middle of reading Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong. The memoir made him reflect on his own experience being Asian American, how it often feels like we’re in between, invisible, and caught in the cross-hairs. The PAC-MAN piece is layered beyond just color. In Cantonese, which Jeff grew up speaking, “White People” and “Black People” directly translate to “White Ghost” and “Black Ghost.”

Jeff’s most recent piece “Resilience” is an illustration of Asian herbal oils and medicines, which are often seen as “magic” and can be used to treat body aches and pains. The piece is full of light and power, an homage to our Asian parents and grandparents, who are generally the strongest, most hardworking and resilient people in our lives. 

“May we always be as resilient as those medicines and more like the people who introduced [them] to our lives,” writes Jeff about this piece.

Looking ahead, Jeff has quite a few exciting projects coming up (some we can’t tease yet), including his own designs that will live on apparel and collaborations with certain public figures in New York City. In the meantime, you can best support Jeff and buy a print at his online shop. Share his work with your friends. Find a way to have him set up a gallery of his art at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, because that is apparently something he has always wanted to do. He’s the best person I know, and you’re going to fall in love with him (but not literally, because he’s mine). 

Follow Jeff:

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