Artist Aunia Kahn on Reinvention and the Courage to Begin Again

By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)

For some artists, the act of creation must begin again. When American painter, curator, and gallerist Aunia Kahn first spoke to Couture Troopers a decade ago, her practice centred largely on digital media, reflecting a growing fascination with the intersection of technology and visual storytelling.

Much has changed since then.

In this conversation with Couture Troopers, Kahn reflects on that shift in her practice, the balance between her roles as artist and curator, and why authenticity continues to guide the work she makes today.

Before we began the conversation, we asked Kahn to reflect on how her work and perspective have evolved since our last interview nearly a decade ago.

It has been ten years since we last featured your work. Looking back at that moment in 2016, how do you see your artistic voice evolving over the years?

AK: Wow, it has been such a long time, and when I look back, so much has changed. I can’t say how much I appreciate you showcasing my work back then and working with you again now, ten years later.

Looking across that span, from when I started professionally in 2004, through our 2016 interview, and into where I am today, it has been a genuinely fascinating journey to reflect on. With some artists, you can follow their work over twenty years and their voice remains relatively consistent, which is not a flaw at all. But for me, the evolution has been significant. There are moments when I look at older pieces and struggle to connect them to who I am now as an artist.

What I find interesting, though, is the feedback I consistently receive from collectors and galleries. They often point to what I think of as a red thread running through every phase and shift in my work. It almost always comes back to the characters.

No matter how much everything else evolves around them, they anchor the work to something recognisably mine. The worlds they inhabit also hold symbolism and deeper meaning that I can often trace back to the moment in my life when the work was created.

For much of your early career, you worked primarily in digital mediums. What prompted the shift toward traditional mediums such as watercolor, gouache, and acrylics, and how did that transition reshape your creative process?

AK: Before I became a career painter, I had to pivot to digital tools due to life-threatening allergies to traditional mediums, and to most things in the world, including 95% of foods. Giving up the tactile experience of painting on a substrate was painful, but I was grateful those tools existed. I often think about artists with similar limitations who came before the digital era. They simply had no alternative.

Building a career as a digital artist in 2004 came with its own challenges. Nearly every gallery responded to submissions with the same blunt message: no digital art. I pushed forward anyway and built a career using the medium I had access to.

In 2016, I received my first diagnosis, but without a treatment plan. Having the knowledge and some support helped, but over the next two years I remained extremely ill and struggled constantly. My doctor explained that the only way to confirm the diagnosis with certainty was to try medication and see if my condition improved. The risk was that it could also set me back to my worst periods. Since I was managing, however barely, I was not willing to risk the hospitalisations and setbacks that might come with it.

Then in 2018, everything came to a complete halt. My health collapsed all at once, and while I was in the hospital I finally agreed to try the medication. Nothing could feel worse than the previous few months had felt. I was willing to die. I genuinely did not care anymore.

That decision changed everything. By 2021, the medication had given me something I had not experienced in years: sustained stability. I had been having numerous allergic reactions daily just from ordinary life. Once medicated, that dropped to two or three times a month.

After about a year of that relative stability, I slowly began integrating gentler mediums into my practice, starting with watercolour and gouache. It felt like being given back something I thought I had lost forever, and it changed not just my materials, but the way I connect with the process of making.

You described the transition as feeling like “starting over completely.” What were some of the most challenging and perhaps, most liberating aspects of rediscovering your practice through physical materials?

AK: The hardest part was reconciling my own voice with an entirely new set of tools. I had spent so many years developing instincts through digital work that starting in watercolour felt like beginning from scratch in every direction at once: what paper, what brushes, what paints, and what grade of each. I began on poor-quality paper and struggled enormously until someone introduced me to 100% cotton paper, which was a complete revelation. The same learning curve applied to paints, moving from student grade to professional, understanding how each medium behaved, and navigating the particular challenges of gouache, like how layers lift if you are not careful when working wet over dry.

But there was real liberation in it too. The physical act of painting—the texture of the substrate, the way pigment moves and settles—gave me a connection to the work I had not felt in years. It was slower, more unpredictable, and far less forgiving than digital, but that resistance became part of what made it meaningful.

Your recent works draw from both folk art traditions and contemporary symbolist influences. How do these visual languages intersect within your current body of work?

AK: Even once I had a handle on the mediums, I found myself still struggling with my voice. Moving from digital to traditional, I realised I had been unconsciously recreating the same work I had made before, just in a new format. I was still limiting myself. I had to sit down and be honest about that.

I was also exhausted. After so many years of exhibitions and creating work in ways that didn’t come naturally, I had lost genuine joy in the process. I think that happens when freedom is missing. When I looked around at my actual life, my home, my clothing, the things I collected and surrounded myself with, I noticed that almost none of it was showing up in my art. I love colour, pattern, and symbolism. I grew up with Polish and German grandparents, surrounded by beautiful dolls, embroidered textiles, and decorative drapery. At home and in how I dress, I am a maximalist through and through. More is more. Colour is everything. Symbolism is everything. Yet everything I loved existed nowhere in the work I was making.

So I began exploring those roots. I also started weaving in my experience with my three rare diseases, which became deeply healing to bring into the work. I was certain it would be rejected, and at first, it was. I lost a significant number of followers when I made that shift, and I will be honest, it hurt. It made me second-guess myself.

But I had already lost so much of my life to illness. I was not willing to also limit the one thing I love most, my creativity, in ways that made me miserable just to make others more comfortable with it.

Was there a particular moment or piece where you felt you had finally found your stride with this new approach?

AK: It took a few attempts to get there. I would find my stride, then pull back because it felt too unconventional, retreat into something more familiar and accessible, get bored quickly, feel genuinely unhappy, and then push forward again. By the third cycle of that back and forth, something finally clicked.

I started small again, but this time I could feel I was onto something real. Then around September 2025, it truly hit. I remember putting the work out there fully expecting it to be too intense, too colourful, too packed with layers and symbolism, and certain it was going to alienate my collector base. That piece was “Beloved Ghosts in the Sanctuary of Memory,” and to this day it remains one of my absolute favourites. It just felt right. It felt like home.

Traditional mediums often carry a very different emotional and tactile quality compared to digital creation. How has working with materials like watercolor and gouache changed the way you think about texture, colour, and narrative in your work?

AK: I have always been deeply tactile. I love holding something special in my hands, feeling its weight and texture. As a kid I played outside, built tree forts, did woodworking, made books, and took auto in high school. Working with my hands has always calmed my mind and helped me manage my illness in ways that screen-based work never quite could. Digital work often felt stressful in that regard, and I frequently struggled to sink into it the way I do when I am physically present in my studio with traditional materials. I also ran a website design and marketing agency for 27 years, so it felt like I never left the computer, which was exhausting.

Touching the work, running my hands over a surface, adding three-dimensional elements, and playing with colour in real time, all of it feels wonderful and alive. A huge part of what excites me is the unpredictability. With digital tools, mistakes were fixable with a single keystroke, and that ease, while practical, removed a certain tension that I now realise I needed. Working traditionally meant unlearning the undo button entirely. Every mark carries weight. A mistake can compromise an entire piece when working in water-based mediums, unlike acrylic or gouache, unless you get creative about how to resolve it.

That is actually something I have come to love. I am a natural problem solver, and I have learned to work my way out of almost any mishap. My partner Michael is also an artist, and even he will bring me a problem and I will find a way through it. There is something deeply satisfying about that, about staying in the work and finding the solution rather than erasing it and starting again.

Many artists speak about their work as a form of personal language. How would you describe the voice that has emerged in this new chapter of your practice?

AK: I could not agree more that the work becomes its own personal language. When I put out an art book years ago collecting the first 13 years of my career, it became very clear to me that what was on those pages was a visual journal of everything I had lived through, experienced, and overcome during that time. It was deeply personal, even when I had not fully realised it while making the work. I could see the themes, mood, and colour changing with events in my life.

When I look at the voice in my new work, it feels different in a way that is hard to articulate. The closest I can get is this: it feels like me. Like I had been waiting in a closet for years, holding my breath for the moment to finally come out. This voice feels not only present and alive in the now, but also rooted in something older—my heritage, my ancestry, the visual world I was raised inside without fully understanding its influence at the time. There is a depth to it that I am still uncovering. I am not sure I have the words for all of it yet, and maybe that is exactly why I make the work. For the first time in my life, creativity is not based in survival like it was all those years, but it is based in some deep guttural place that is familiar.

In addition to being a painter, you are also a curator and gallerist. How do these roles influence the way you approach your own artistic practice?

AK: I often have to remind myself that the guidance and encouragement I give to artists as a gallerist and curator should be the same way I speak to myself about my own practice. It is much easier said than done. I find it genuinely easier to support other artists, to champion them, share what I know, answer their questions, and create opportunities for them to shine. I encourage them not to fixate on algorithms or follower counts, to move toward the work they would make when no one is watching.

And yet I have to consciously apply that same advice to myself. The most authentic work does not come from a place that puts the audience before the artist or the work. I know that. I just have to keep remembering it.

Looking at the works you are creating today, what themes or ideas feel most important for you to explore right now?

AK: I create almost entirely from intuition, so the themes usually reveal themselves to me after the work is already made. I know that is not how most people work, but those moments of recognition have always been some of the brightest parts of my process.

For example, I have a series of works featuring women with their heads detached from their bodies, with nature growing out of their necks. At first it struck me as a strange thing to be drawn to, but after making several of them I realised it was deeply connected to my illnesses. There are very real and significant physical issues I experience involving my head and neck, and I had been processing that through the work without consciously knowing it.

That process of looking back at finished work and excavating what was actually happening beneath the surface is something I find endlessly fascinating. It is even more interesting to go back months and even years later and have even more profound realisations of the meanings. It is like reverse engineering your own subconscious.

As you reflect on the past decade of growth and transformation, what continues to inspire you as an artist moving forward?

AK: The biggest inspiration is approaching everything I make with a sense of play, joy, and experimentation. Staying true to my own authenticity, even when it is unconventional or not universally embraced, has become the foundation of everything. I have never felt better about my work than I do right now, and I think that comes directly from simply not caring whether it lands for everyone else. I just love to create. That love, kept pure and unguarded, is what continues to drive everything forward.

In many ways, Aunia Kahn’s journey over the past decade reflects the quiet resilience that defines an artist’s life. The shift from digital creation to traditional mediums was not simply a technical change, but a deeply personal rediscovery of process, material, and voice.

Today, her paintings carry a renewed sense of presence — where folk art echoes meet contemporary symbolism, and where each brushstroke speaks to the patience required to begin again.

Ten years after her first appearance on Couture Troopers, Aunia Kahn’s work reminds us that artistic evolution rarely follows a straight path. Sometimes, the most meaningful transformations emerge only after the courage to start over.

Featured Images:

• ‘An Immortal Love That Gathered Every Black Wing Home’, Acrylic, Gouache, Oil Pastel, Coloured Pencil, Gold Ink on Arches, 8” x 10” | Artwork by Aunia Kahn

• Aunia Kahn with her artwork | Exclusive image courtesy of Aunia Kahn.