Phu’s practice has long tussled with duality and opposition: humour and seriousness, cultural dislocation and cultural homage, affability and anxiety. Painted in a deliberately naïve style with tongue-in-cheek subject matter, while also employing calligraphy, traditional ink paintings and visual motifs from Chinese culture, Phu’s paintings investigate cultural identity within an Australian context.

In 2023, Jason Phu was a finalist in all three of the Art Gallery of NSW’s most prestigious prizes: the Sulman Prize, the Archibald Prize and the Wynne prize. He was also commissioned by Dark Mofo to create Without Us You Would Have Never Learnt About Love, a 15-minute operatic tragedy installation. In 2022, he was included in the exhibition Like a Wheel That Turns: The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and in 2021, he was awarded the ACMI X Mordant Family Moving Image Commission for Young Australian Artists. Additional significant exhibitions include the annual curated exhibition Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the 2017 West Space commission, My parents met at the fish market.

Image credit: Jason Phu by Tim Herbert.