Tarot collage 🌗

Today, we’re excited to officially launch our interactive tarot deck with Moonlight, designed by artist Christine Shan Shan Hou.

You’ve seen the cards throughout the week in stories by Miriam Gordis, Terry Nguyen and Evan Grillon, Katy Kelleher, Vivian Medithi, and Michelle Lyn King…

Now play with them yourself in Moonlight! They are free to use.

Below, Daisy Alioto chats with Christine Shan Shan Hou, the artist behind the Dirt x Moonlight interactive tarot deck.

Daisy Alioto: Did you have any familiarity with tarot before we did this project?

Christine Shan Shan Hou: I didn't really have a relationship to tarot. My relationship with it was through many of my friends who got very into it, but I liked looking at the pictures of the cards. 

DA: Did you reach out to any of them over the course of creating this to say, "Does this resonate with the meaning of the card?"

CSSH: Yeah, I did. I reached out to one friend, she's also a writer. Her name is Sarah McCarry, and she's always been very interested in tarot. I shared the work with her around the same time I shared it with you.

DA: My favorite card is the Peach on the Bed, and almost everyone I've talked to has said that's their favorite card too, so it'll be interesting to see if that's a theme with the audience. I love it because it's such a sensual image, but it also does feel like a focal point of a sun. 

I'm curious how, with your collages, it seems like it's always a process of selecting objects and layers—whether you're doing it for a tarot card or a standalone collage, or maybe even a book cover. I know you do book covers. I'm not sure how many of them have been collages, but in a sense, I imagine your process was sort of the same?

CSSH: These were drawn from my archive—it's all work that I have made dating back to 2014 or 2015. A lot of this was combing through my archive of collages, and examining how specific objects change—say a shell, hand, book, or a type of gem or mineral—and tracing them over time.

DA: I feel like the collages—the cards—really have a relationship to each other, specifically, for me, around sculpture and how sculpture appears, reappears. The sense of something sort of ancient runs through all of them.

CSSH: Yeah, I'm really drawn towards the talismanic. I don't know if that's an actual word.

DA: It definitely is.

CSSH: Just locating these objects that visually speak to me, and not even interrogating why they speak to me—it's a very instinctive and intuitive moment. 

And there's certain things that I like; I like seashells, I like rocks, gems, and minerals. I like how in different decades the colors are different. You can follow the evolution of color printing by looking through these vintage science and nature books, and when you take them out of their scientific context, you create your own sort of mysticism; your own language.

DA: Was it fun to revisit your archive?

CSSH: It was a lot of fun. I started making work in 2012, and I have a lot of work. I've worked really fast, and there's so many pieces I'd actually totally forgotten about that I've made. It was easy to do, too. I have a Tumblr, and I archive every single one of my artworks on there. Then I add a lot of hashtags. There'll be #seashell for all the collages that have a seashell on them, or #landscape for all of them that are landscape based.

It was fun to click on something like “#seashell” and see the first collages I made that featured them, through to seeing what they look like now. It was like seeing the evolution of a certain word, of a vocabulary over time, which is very satisfying as a visual artist. Very rarely do I really dig back and go through everything again.

DA: I still use Tumblr too sometimes. Not in as organized a way, but sometimes I feel like I'm one of the only people that still uses it.

CSSH: It's so great. I'm like, "I hope it doesn't disappear," because everything is archived on my Tumblr. It's a special audience out there too. It's mostly young people, a lot of them queer and non-binary. I mean, these are the people that I follow, or that comment on my work, and it's really refreshing.

DA: When you were younger, as a child, were you interested in collaging?

CSSH: My first medium as an artist is poetry. And in a lot of senses, that is a collage practice in itself. I was gathering and collecting these lyrics from Courtney Love, Nirvana, and Silverchair songs, seeing them as little poems in a way, and then writing my own poems in response to them.

The collage stuff didn't come until after I felt stuck with the rigidity of poetry. Poetry is just much harder; it’s a different and difficult space. So I was drawn to collaging because of the ease of existence in which all the materials and visuals are already there, and you’re just making something new of it.

In a lot of ways collage is actually just poetry, because when you're writing a poem—this is how I think about it—imagine every day that you're navigating an enormous field or meadow, and you're collecting stuff along the way, like flowers, weeds, rocks, dead bugs or whatever. Then at the end of the day, you can arrange it in this bouquet. That's kind of what poetry is, or how I see it in terms of languages and words. And then with collaging, it's really fun to do that from a more surreal and visual space. Surreal, because I'm using magazines from the '70s and '80s.

DA: And who are your favorite poets right now?

CSSH: Lisa Robertson is definitely one of them. Etel Adnan is another. Oh, Lyn Hejinian is very, very big for me too.

DA: Oh, yeah. I actually hadn't heard of her work until she passed away, and then I read My Life in one sitting, and I was like, "This is incredible."

CSSH: It's really amazing. So many amazing lines. 🫳

Summer of Bibliomancy, the playlist…