For most of her adult life, artist Mary Jhun has drawn inspiration from a distinct muse: fractured silhouettes of girls, embellished with surreal details. Her paintings have been a way to process trauma, loneliness and despair, while also serving as a fascinating feedback loop into and out of her vivid dream life. She experiences the "girls" in dreams as she paints them, using these visions as fuel for future works.
But when she started using a CPAP machine to treat sleep apnea, her dreams vanished overnight.
"What do we choose? Do we choose the thing that kind of ignites our creativity or our health? And I feel like a lot of artists go through that all the time, no matter what the topic is," Mary said.
Now, in a new solo exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art, Mary has found her way back — to both her girls and her dreams — by incorporating surreal CPAP machinery into her paintings and tricking her body to dream again. Yet a question lingers: What toll does creativity take on our physical, emotional and relational health?
Guest:
- Mary Jhun, artist
Mary Jhun's creative touchpoints:
- Cafe Ghibli playlist
- "Kiki's Delivery Service"
- " Manifesto of Surrealism" by André Breton
- Sigmund Freud
- Carl Jung
Mentioned in this episode:
- Snow White | Disney fairytale princess known for her woodland friends, kindness and cottagecore charm
- Studio Ghibli | Beloved Japanese animation studio behind dreamy, detailed films like "Totoro" and "Spirited Away"
- "In Losing Sleep, I Painted" | Mary Jhun's 2025 exhibit at the Oceanside Museum of Art exploring the tension between health and creativity through her signature "girls" figures
- Etch-A-Sketch | Red-framed drawing toy repurposed by Mary Jhun as a surprising tool for emotional expression
- "Nothing Lasts Forever" | 2022 gallery show centered on impermanence, featuring 20 Etch-A-Sketch works by Mary Jhun created in a one week and sold with the reminder: once it's gone, it's gone
- Games of Berkeley | Longtime Bay Area shop packed with puzzles, strategy games, novelties and nostalgic treasures
- "Dune" | Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic of sand, prophecy and power set on the desert planet of Arrakis
Sources:
- Café Table with Absinthe (Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam)
- "F. Scott Fitzgerald's life was a study in destructive alcoholism" (Dr. Howard Markel, PBS News, 2017)
- Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera | Romance & Heartbreak (Rise Art, 2019)
- Sleep apnea (Mayo Clinic)
- Early or premature menopause (Office on Women's Health)
- Surrealism and Dreams (MoMA)
- "Sleep technique used by Salvador Dalí really works" (Yasemin Saplakoglu, Live Science, 2021)
- "Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot" (Célia Lacaux, Thomas Andrillon, Céleste Bastoul, Yannis Idir, Alexandrine Fonteix-Galet, Isabelle Arnulf and Delphine Oudiette, Science Advances, 2021)
- "Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance" (Adam Haar Horowitz, Kathleen Esfahany, Tomás Vega Gálvez, Pattie Maes and Robert Stickgold, Scientific Reports, 2023)
- "Relationship between Lucid Dreaming, Creativity and Dream Characteristics" (Nicolas Zink, International Journal of Dream Research, 2013)
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Episode 5: Mary Jhun Transcript
Julia Dixon Evans: A lot of artists wrestle with some kind of personal struggle: bad habits, unhealthy vices or intense emotional experiences that seem to fuel their work. At some point they have to decide: Do I keep putting my health and quality of life at risk for the sake of my art?
Throughout history, some artists have leaned on drugs or alcohol, or found creative energy in psychological extremes or turbulent relationships. Think: Van Gogh's absinthe, Fitzgerald's alcoholism and Frida Kahlo's tumultuous romance with Diego Rivera. For San Diego painter Mary Jhun, it was bad sleep.
Mary Jhun: When I had my first sleepover with my friends, my best friend had once told me that I snore like a baby pig. And I was like, oh, that's cute.
Evans: But, of course, Mary couldn't hear herself while she slept. While her friends marvelled at her bizarre snorting, she was off in a totally different world.
Jhun: I've always been an avid dreamer, where it's like, I know I'm gonna have a good dream tonight. Every night it always felt like that. It's literally like walking into a movie you have no idea about every night. And hence my paintings, hence being a surrealist.
Evans: For about 20 years, Mary has painted the same signature characters. She calls them the girls. She sees them in her dreams at night and paints them when she wakes up.
Jhun: I once wrote, the girls are it, I'm just the hands. I feel like that idea has always been so much bigger than me. And so in those dreams, sometimes I'll see them as mountains — they're huge, they're huge-huge. And then I'm just me in the dream walking. So I'm like, sometimes I'm them, sometimes I'm not.
Evans: But back in the real world, there was still that persistent snoring.
Jhun: In recent years, my boyfriend had been telling me like, hey, you should probably check that out cause it's starting to sound different (than) like a baby pig. And so the moment that I got it checked and was pretty much diagnosed with sleep apnea and all that stuff, they had me wear a mask, which is called a CPAP. And the moment I received the CPAP, a month in, I lost all of my dreams. I stopped dreaming, and I didn't know why. And that week, the first week where I couldn't dream, I was crying every night and I would nudge my boyfriend and be like, I don't know what's going on. It's like, I feel like I'm going into a black abyss.
Evans: Mary's whole life has been dedicated to art and to her dreams. She's used both together to help her understand herself and to navigate a series of life-upending challenges, and to learn to let go. But what happens when the thing that fuels your art disappears?
Jhun: I don't know, it just felt weird because I had things taken from me growing up. Whether it was a physical thing or just biology. And so, that was another thing I just felt very emotional about where I was like, please, OK, you already took parts of my life away, world, the universe. Please don't take my dreams away just because I want to rest. And that's such a weird relationship. In wanting to have a better relationship to sleep health, I was losing the thing that gave me my paintings.
Evans: This is the story of how Mary Jhun lost her dreams. How she traded in her artistic muse hoping for health. And how she found a way to have both.
From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.
[Theme Music]
Evans: Mary lives on the edge of a green canyon in Serra Mesa. In her backyard, nestled among the foliage and birds, is a little makeshift studio she built herself — her painting cabin. It's dreamlike in its own way — the perfect place for her to work.
Jhun: Hi! Oh, yay!
Anthony Wallace: Hello!
Jhun: Welcome!
Evans: My producer Anthony and I visited on an idyllic early Spring afternoon.
Jhun: Let's see, I feel like the temperature is about 65, surrounded by tropical plants and fruit plants. My friends have been calling me Snow White lately because, since the cabin has so many windows, I can see all of the natural elements, and it's just all squirrels, lizards hanging out.
Evans: And mixing with the sounds of birds was Mary's go-to painting playlist.
Jhun: It's actually on Cafe Ghibli right now. Or is it "GIB-lee" and "JIB-lee"? But it's Bossa Nova style.
[Music: "A Town with an Ocean" from "Kiki's Delivery Service"]
Jhun: I'm so glad you guys got to see it. Not many people see this room. Dude, it's beautiful. So many windows, the air flows here. It's literally the perfect cabin. It's a painting cabin.
It kind of resembles the "Kiki's Delivery Service" painter in the forest, a Studio Ghibli film. There was a painter in the forest where it's just nature around her, just a cabin full of art supplies. I think that's why I wanted the cabin.
Evans: The walls and tables in the little cabin are covered in her paintings. Canvases are stacked in corners and on easels. Piles of books and jars stuffed with paintbrushes and other supplies are organized on shelves and the windowsills.
In March, Mary opened an exhibit at the Oceanside Museum of Art called "In Losing Sleep, I Painted." When we visited, she was putting the finishing touches on the pieces. All of them feature her girls: simple figures in profile, sprouting and bursting in all directions with machinery, plants and splotches of color.
Jhun: So most of the paintings are split in planes, in different planes. So it's diptychs, triptychs. I wanted to show the cut rhythm of my sleep through the actual physical cutting of the piece. But that was what started the idea of really fully manifesting the feeling of getting ripped away from something that is so precious. And giving it to something that has a different hold on me, which was the mask.
Evans: Sleep apnea is a condition where your breathing repeatedly stops and starts, causing snoring and other health issues. A CPAP machine is used to treat sleep apnea by pushing air into your nose and mouth to keep your airway open.
Mary's CPAP machine is the literal, mechanical manifestation of that choice between muse and health. The mask and medical tubing appear throughout these paintings. It's elegant and invasive to the girls and their vivid, dreamlike worlds.
In one painting, one of the girls looks like she's gasping for breath. In another, a machine shoots blue air into her mouth. One painting, though, is devoid of color. The background looks blank.
Wallace: Is she kind of sparse in that one? Cause she's drained of personality from lack of dreams?
Jhun: Yes, yes! That was actually the first piece, so that was like one of the first ones where visually I'm like, I know exactly this feeling. It's so raw. I need to document this. I feel cut off from my access of this idea of visual peace.
Wallace: And it's blank in the background as opposed to being filled in with a rich, dreamlike landscape.
Jhun: Yeah. Nothing. Yeah, just this airy space.
Evans: Check out your art interpretation, Anthony. Good job, A+!
Jhun: I know, dude! Anthony, you're killing it! Oh my gosh.
[Music: "Carrying You" from "Castle in the Sky"]
Evans: Mary's not just obsessed with the aesthetics of her dreams, she's incredibly well-read on the psychology of human dreaming, and has done a ton of research surrounding herself with literature that fed her fascination with dreams.
Jhun: When I was 18, I came across the "Surrealist Manifesto," and that was kind of the key opener for me for feeling good about the thing that I do every night, which is dream. I knew I liked dreams, but I didn't really find the importance of the human experience in the depths of dreams until I picked up that book. And so when I read that, and also being interested in psychology and Freud and Carl Jung, I was able to find the importance of those dreams more so now.
And so dreams have always been so inspiring for me to become a surrealist, only because I felt like my day-to-day was answered when I slept, and had those revelations. It's like a storybook, I think, cause I'm able to reflect on, oh yeah, why did I dream that? Or how did that make me feel? Or, oh man, I didn't realize I was thinking about that yesterday until I had that dream. It answered so many things for me.
I always think, if I'm at a sleep state and I'm not fully controlling my dreams and my brain is just firing off, I always think that my dream is telling me what I need in a kind way. It's like tough love in the form of dreams. And so whether that is I feel bad about something I did, and it's taking a hold as this very beautiful, chaotic, "Dune"-like dream where you're in the sands by yourself and it's cause you have to apologize or something.
Evans: With decades of practice, Mary has some pretty wild descriptions of her dreams. In theory, we all have these intricate movies playing in our heads every night. Mary is just really good at paying attention to, and remembering them.
Jhun: Sometimes I feel like I'm a ghost and I'm watching things happen. A lot of the times, too. Yeah, I just remember that tangible feeling of those dreams and that's kind of the most important part for me is the sound, the colors of the dreams, not necessarily the full objects, because a lot of times mid-dream it alters. Something looks so jagged and then I'll turn around as the dreamer and all of a sudden everything is like rounded. It keeps changing. And it's just so fun.
Evans: So Mary's dreams have been a key window into her subconscious. And her art has been her way of recording and understanding them. It's always been her and the girls, bouncing back and forth between dreams and art like a surreal feedback loop. They've helped her persist through every major challenge in her life.
One of her most powerful — and therapeutic — series used a medium you might not normally see in fine art.
Jhun: I had a whole series of doing Etch-A-Sketches. I have one right now. I don't know if you guys want to see it. I would have to make it.
Wallace: So you're kind of a pro at Etch-A-Sketch?
Jhun: Yes.
Evans: She pulled out an old Etch-A-Sketch and immediately began creating a stunningly detailed rendition of the girls, all while telling us how she got so into the classic art toy. This blew me away to witness.
Jhun: How old was I? I was like 26. I had just lost my friend, it was a studio mate of mine from Barrio. And I didn't know how to cope with it at the time. Two months later, I ran into an Etch-A-Sketch at Games of Berkeley up in Berkeley, California. It was my first time really working with an Etch-A-Sketch. What it did for me was so weird, where I didn't realize I was just practicing letting go of my own art in that form. And I think subconsciously, it was taking away a lot of my pain. Cause I was just able to create these girls on the fly and then let them go, create them, let them go. And it was just a form of emotional discipline in getting myself healed.
About four years ago, I did a show called "Nothing Lasts Forever." And it was based off showing the girls in 20 Etch-A-Sketches. I wanted to introduce the idea of temporary through the thing that is also temporary, which is the Etch-A-Sketch design. I hung up Etch-A-Sketches on the wall, and I wanted to talk about the importance of practicing letting go. One of those topics was grief and aiding with someone important dying, or something getting taken away from you. I felt strongly about showing that series where, OK, I'm going to make 20 and I'm going to do it all in one week and I'm going to present it and I have a thesis about it. Yeah, it was a success. I actually sold 16 of them. When I sold them, I made everybody sign something where, if you drop it, that's it.
Evans: So people took home Etch-A-Sketches, like they just had to carefully walk?
Jhun: Yes!
Wallace: Do you have any idea of those 16 that you sold, if they're still intact?
Jhun: They're still good. Yeah, one is in Guam. Yeah, it made it.
[Music]
Evans: In her mid-20s, Mary faced an unexpected major life challenge: premature menopause. On a biological level, menopause means that the ovaries no longer release eggs or produce sufficient estrogen. On an emotional level, for many women, the symptoms and implications go way beyond fertility.
Jhun: I found out I couldn't have children. And so with those things happening in my life, I've been able to transfer the learning part of it to art, which is, oh, well, I'm OK. I can let go of things and still be upright and still feel strong.
Evans: So, she turned to the girls in her dreams and paintings. Just like how her girls recently took on elements of the CPAP machinery, when she was going through early menopause, they changed to reflect Mary's reckoning with her body.
Jhun: When I think about how the design changed from this organic, young, soft girl into when I found that out in my mid-20s, I was looking at my work recently and I realized that was the big structure shift. It was when the girls started to break apart and I was thinking, well, I was strong before I found out, and I'm strong even with this thing happening to me, and if I can portray more of the physical idea of the feeling into the paintings of pain and being pulled apart and put back together, that will just reinforce the idea of strength for me. The girls during that time started to break apart. They started to take on a lot more tendrils, kind of wrapping into itself. So it was just a metaphor of keeping yourself together while things were happening to you. All the things I was drawing was coming out of the girls to restructure herself. I've always wanted to put into perspective that the tools are actually in you to maintain what you want to become post-trauma.
Evans: Mary's work right now, in this artistic era, is inspired by the loss of her dreams, and it echoes what she went through in her 20s. Once again, her girls were breaking apart. Mary's identity as a painter is someone who creates surreal images based on or connected to her dreams. So when she lost that, what did it say about who she was?
Jhun: It was like literally losing my tools. There was a night where I was sitting in bed, I was crying, I was telling my boyfriend like, oh no, oh my gosh. Since that was the first time it was fully taken away from me, I realized at that moment how important it was. It was literally taking paper away or taking all the utensils away. There would be times where I'd be so frustrated, but then I knew that I would feel the effects of not having that mask on and not getting that aid. So it's a little bit of like, well, what is the drug? Is it the finally getting air in my lungs or is it the dreams? It was that weird toxic relationship of things that are both healthy. What do we choose? Do we choose the thing that kind of ignites our creativity or our health? And I feel like a lot of artists go through that all the time, no matter what the topic is.
Evans: Mary resisted wearing the CPAP mask. She wasn't willing to give up her dreams. But without the mask, Mary's sleep would suffer and she'd feel tired. She needed both: her health and her art. So she found a way to bring the dreams back. Mary had already spent years learning how to manipulate her dreams: hacking them with a series of little tricks to make them more vivid and easier to recall.
Jhun: I used to joke that I have a snack stash next to my bed and it's not because I love snacking — obviously, I love snacking — but it's cause man, it always gave me crazy dreams. Just a couple of nuts or something or a spoonful peanut butter.
Wallace: Really?
Jhun: Mm hmm. Or even just like one handful…
Wallace: Just one spoonful of peanut butter?
Jhun: Yeah, dude, it does so much.
Evans: I'm going to try that.
Jhun: It's so interesting. Or just healthy fats, something is triggered when you're going to sleep, when you just ate something it's trying to process, it's like whoa.
Evans: This kind of dream-hacking was eventually the thing that allowed her to regain her dreams.
Jhun: So the mask still does give me issues, but I know I need to use it, so I do use it. But I've been able to dream and I think it's because I was, I don't know, I just begged for it.
And so, my goal was that anytime I dreamed, I was obsessing about it because I was like, oh, I got one. OK, what do I remember? So, every time I wake up now, any time I have a dream, I would just keep my eyes closed, try to find my phone, and then — literally still squinting — put voice memo, and I'll just start talking. And so that I can kind of still be submersed, or in the space, in the dark, and remembering all the little things that I could remember. Or, I would literally take notes and then I'll just squint like this, and I'm like, OK, there was a rat here, there was this, there was that.
Evans: Mary's actually tapping into a rich history of dream-enhancing techniques among surrealist artists. Salvador Dalí famously used a spoon. He'd hold it in his hand and the moment he started to drift off, he'd drop it, waking himself up just in time to record his dream. Recently, researchers studied this barely-asleep dream state. Participants were asked to solve a math problem, then some were allowed to drift off while holding a cup. And as they entered a light sleep, they would drop it, just like Dalí. Those who reached that in-between dream state and remembered it, were far more likely to experience an epiphany and solve the math problem.
Many studies confirm that dreams are a special space for creativity and breakthroughs. Mary's story proves we can harness them if we practice observing them or even go to great lengths — as she says — to stay submerged in the dream and record what we see.
Jhun: So now I have this understanding that sometimes the mask doesn't allow me to dream. But, when it does, it's big. And so I'm back to dreaming on an every-other-day thing. It's not every day still, but it's getting back there. I think what helped is venting about it because my brain is just completely charged with all these paintings that that's what I'm seeing before I fall asleep.
Evans: When you say venting and you're gesturing towards your painting, do you mean like creating art in a way of venting? Is that what you mean?
Jhun: Yeah. I'm creating the images that I can implant in my head. So it's almost like, I used to think, am I painting out of my dreams? Or do I need my dreams to make the paintings? Or is it now vice versa? I just need to express in the open, aware brain of mine, and say it out loud through my work. And then, therefore, I can dream about that. It was kind of a funny what comes first, chicken or the egg thing. But now it's been that relationship for me, where the more I paint, the more I'm seeing what I'm doing through my dreams, yeah.
Evans: Now the dreams and her girls are on their way back. They've ushered Mary through crisis, and in that way, they represent survival to her — a sort of living through it.
Jhun: That was my goal to literally to cope with my life and seeing what the girls were in the version of a friend, or I don't even want to say a stronger version of myself, but it was more so like, if I can see her in this type of beautiful, artistic mess, it gave me gas to like, oh, I could do that too. Hence the somewhat warrior-looking headdresses, it kind of showed that the girls were really strong, in how they thought, and how much they can carry. And that was always the point of the girls. They used to be called the weight of memories, and it was a personal challenge to be able to carry all of my traumas and still be able to walk. And so it was just that metaphor of the strength in a human is like how much you can carry and still walk.
[Music]
Evans: A special thanks to Mary Jhun for her help with this episode.
You can find a transcript and check out some of Mary's art at our website, kpbs.org/TheFinest. Her exhibit will be up at the Oceanside Museum of Art through June 15.
Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe, leave a rating and share it with your friends.
Next Thursday on The Finest, San Diego's last alt-weekly has ended its print run after 52 years. What happens when a city loses its alternative press?
Scott Lewis: The value of an alt-weekly to a community is, I think, uncontestable. It's just wonderful. They were conversational, they had a point of view cause they knew they had to be different.
Evans: The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.