Insisting on Joy: The Art of Refusing to Collapse
What if joy itself is a serious practice? A discipline of attention. A form of resistance. A decision to keep looking at the light, even when you’ve memorized the dark.
I find that I keep thinking about an Artwork Archive article I read a month or two ago: How Painting Joy Became a Daily Act of Resistance for This Artist about artist Jackie Liu.
“Liu is a disabled Chinese American painter and storyteller based in California, living with a range of physical and mental illnesses. Her work is informed—but not defined—by the trauma threaded through those experiences. Her paintings explore joy, wonder, playfulness, and humor as "modes of resistance”—ways to survive and imagine something better.”
Not All Art About Pain Must Stay There
Reading about Jackie Liu’s practice, I kept returning to this one sentence in particular: “Insisting upon the seriousness of joy is an act of liberation in itself.”
It’s rare to see joy treated with that kind of gravity. Especially in conversations about healing through art. Especially when you’re making work from inside illness, trauma, or grief. So many of us have been conditioned to believe that our pain is the most valuable part of our story. That the worth of our art lives in its darkness. That our creative legitimacy depends on how much we’re willing to excavate the wound.
But Liu’s work proposes a different truth.
Joy is not a distraction. It’s not naïveté. And it’s certainly not an escape. It is an offering. A way of refusing to collapse into the narrative of pain alone. Her paintings, full of softness and detail, invite us to consider what else we might make if survival was no longer our only frame.
Joy becomes the proof that we are still here. And still becoming.
When Joy Becomes a Daily Practice
I’ve written before (often) about the complexity of healing through art. That it isn’t always redemptive. That it can re-trigger what we thought we had metabolized. But there’s another layer to this story. What happens when we allow joy to become a practice? Not something we earn once we’re well, but something we engage in now, in the midst of it all.
In Liu’s small scenes … the sunlight on a desk, a friend in a familiar pose … I see the same thing I often return to myself in repetitive fiber art. That discipline of attention. That act of choosing to notice. It is not passive. It is not decorative. It is devotional.
This kind of creativity is not about catharsis. It’s about continuity. It’s what happens when you keep showing up, not because the pain is gone, but because the making itself becomes a way to stay inside your life.
Joy is not the goal. It is the method.
The Burnout of Performance
When Liu writes about “influencer creep,” I felt a familiar ache. It’s a phrase I hadn’t used before, but instantly recognized. That creeping sensation that your creativity is no longer yours. That your work must be more shareable, more marketable, more legible. That even your healing must look good in public.
Especially for artists with marginalized identities, the pressure to perform authenticity, vulnerability, and growth can become exhausting. There’s a point at which sharing crosses into self-surveillance. When the work begins to harden into expectation. When your audience starts to expect you to stay in the wound you’ve just started crawling out of.
Liu captures this perfectly when she says, “Trauma doesn’t translate well into performance analytics.” And yet the systems we’re in demand that it does. That we mine our pain for engagement. That we stay in our most readable version of suffering.
To step away from that cycle is radical. It is a kind of private recovery. A refusal to be reduced. And it creates space for joy to return. Not as an aesthetic, but as a boundary. As a choice.
The Theory Beneath the Surface
Although Liu doesn’t cite theory in her interview, her work closely echoes the thinking of José Esteban Muñoz, a queer theorist whose book Cruising Utopia reframes joy as a vision of what could be. He argues that queerness, and by extension liberation, is not just about critique, but about imagining. About glimpsing the not-yet and giving form to a world that isn’t here yet, but might be.
Muñoz invites us to think of joy as futurity. As a practice of looking beyond what has harmed us. Not as denial, but as resistance.
Seen through this lens, Liu’s paintings become acts of world-building. They are gentle refusals. Each image is a quiet theory. A statement that says: this too matters. This softness. This pleasure. This moment of rest.
They do not pretend the trauma didn’t happen. But they refuse to center it.
In my own creative practice and in my work with clients, I return often to this idea. That joy doesn’t negate the wound. It expands the field of what is possible. It allows us to feel fully human again.
I’ve been thinking about this even more deeply since finishing Microjoys by Cyndie Spiegel, a book that lingers long after the final page. Spiegel writes about joy not as something grand or performative, but as something immediate and grounded. A fleeting moment of light on the hardest days. A pause. A breath. A reminder that beauty still exists even in the thick of pain.
Like Liu’s paintings, these microjoys do not erase trauma. They do not ask us to forget. But they create space for softness in the middle of it all. They insist that even when the world feels unrelenting, there is still something worth noticing, something worth holding. A tender kind of survival.
What Her Work Reminds Me
There are days I stitch for the ritual, not the result. Most days, actually; I am much more interested in crochet process than product. There are moments I photograph a quiet beam of light catching the blonde in my dog’s fur, just to remember that I am still here. That I am still choosing. That the little things matter.
Liu’s art reminds me that joy is not accidental. It is crafted. And sometimes it is protected fiercely from the forces that would flatten it.
The joy she paints is not loud. It is not manic. It is not meant to erase what came before. It is careful. Cumulative. It gathers. It holds. It keeps insisting that there is more to the story.
To practice joy in this way, especially from inside pain, is not just personal. It is political. It is survival. And it is a kind of making that we rarely name but desperately need.
This is what healing can look like. Not triumph, but attention. Not cure, but care. A series of small decisions to stay present with ourselves, even when we are unsure what will come next.
If you liked this work, remember that it does take work. Support it if you can:
You Might Also Like to Read:
From other writers:
Gratitude to
, , , , and for the inspiring work:
I love the quote from Beth Kempton in Kokoro “Joy is reason enough to do anything”. I often think of it as an antidote to worry. Thank you so much for sharing the beautiful conversation that Claire and I had about joy, and the utterly joyful post of Janelle’s singing. I love it so very much 💙🦋
Thanks Kathryn for including the podcast conversation in this inspiring post about joy and why it's so vital that we continue to follow it.