Building a world, not an audience with Kening Zhu

Disentangling creation from validation, dancing between private and public veils

Welcome to SEE YOU—a companion for artists, thinkers, and analog lovers with ideas, inspiration, and reflections on living an intentional creative life.

Today I am interviewing artist, teacher, and digital world builder Kening Zhu for Quietly Public, a series about sharing without performing one’s self on the internet. Join to follow along!

Every so often I discover someone on the internet who is an immediate soul connection. Their work mirrors my very thoughts and breaks open creative possibilities. Stumbling upon Kening Zhu two years ago did that for me.

I first discovered artist Kening’s web world two years ago, after reading this SPACIES interview. I’ve mentioned her in this newsletter here and there ever since. When I was doubting my choice to leave my engineering career, I was most assuaged in hearing her tell me, “Confidence is built after, not before.”

The same goes for creative practice, and really, any scary action in life. Even choosing to present yourself online without focusing on an audience, a sentiment echoed by Rick Rubin, who stated “The audience comes last. I’m not making it for them, I’m making it for me.” I also believe this, in making art as your own medicine.

Kening is a trailblazer who has been championing the idea of world building instead of audience building for several years now. Quietly Public is greatly influenced by her. I’m excited for you to get to know Kening through today’s interview.

Photo by paul b goode

Hi Kening! Please introduce yourself and the various aspects of your creative work.

I’m an artist, writer, teacher, and guide. My work reimagines how we inhabit our multidimensional selves and our businesses on the internet, rooted in the primacy of inner worlds, inner authority, and internal experience.

I write, share ideas, make visual art, animations, tactile experiments, and digital worlds. Making art is how I stay in conversation with my life.

I’m a child immigrant, Scorpio stellium, Aries moon, self-projected Human Design Projector 2/4. My creative energetic form is a vortex.

In your blog post “build a world, not an audience”, you encourage world building in one’s own digital ecosystem, which will lead to the right audience finding you. When did you begin your world building practice, and what clues helped you trust that it was a generative and sustainable approach?

In early 2020, I left NYC and started a nomadic life. My website felt like my only “permanent” home and I gave myself permission to inhabit it, fully. I showed up every morning and allowed my mind free rein do its thing. I hit publish even when the ideas or images felt unfinished. I knew that I was speaking into the void.

In 2021, I had an epiphany around what the structure of a website could be. I called it an infinity house on the webs—with the experiential logic of rooms, journeys, portal doors. I started thinking of my website as a magical, sacred place I was in relationship with.

In 2023, I became obsessed with reimagining business from the perspectives and powers of an artist. I realized that what I was already doing—building my body-home-world of work—was a more magnetic form of “marketing” than any audience-chasing strategies could be.

At the time of writing “build a world, not an audience,” I had no proof that it actually worked. it was a manifesto-style post I wrote because I was so irritated and bored by the existing strategies. I had been doing this work for years, without giving it a name.

I trusted it because it allowed me to stay in my creative power, and do what felt most effortless to me: create. The main clue was that it gave me more energy, rather than depleting me.

These days, I do have the external validation that proves that world-building “works.” But my proof doesn’t matter. Proof did not keep me going all those years; my practice did.

What tools do you recommend for people as they build their own digital worlds?

A notebook: an open place to take your time imagining, dreaming, thinking, and drawing out the shape and structure of your world, rather than feeling pressured by the templates you see. It is your world, after all. I also encourage making moodboards, writing word clouds, collecting inspiration—luxuriating in the process as creative play, rather than as a chore.

A database: to organize and accumulate ongoing and finished entries, with category tags. I use Notion, but you can use anything. I call this my world-seeding practice. If you make this public [ed note: like a digital garden!], you already have a world.

A website tool: what really matters is finding an interface that feels intuitive for you to use, so I recommend trying several before committing. start with an idea of what you want (ie, go back to the notebook). if you intend on being prolific in your practice, I’d recommend one with a CMS.

I built my current website on Squarespace 7.0 in 2015. it’s gone through many iterations, but it’s still there due to my inertia and the sheer volume of work that moving house would entail. I appreciate its functionality and robustness, but I find myself itching to dissolve the square. I’ll likely move in the next year or two to a custom coded design.

Focusing too much on finding the perfect tool, system, or process is often displaced anxiety about work itself. The best tool is one that helps you move forwards, in this season of your life. People don’t expect themselves to live in one house forever. You’re allowed to change your mind.

Kening’s website world

For many years you created and posted in your digital world daily. How did this rhythm shape your world and practice?

It gave my creative energy permission to take up space and feel like it deserved a voice. It disentangled my desire to create from any expectation of acknowledgement, validation, or any other carrot. This was incredibly healing, deeply empowering, and, of course, sometimes lonely.

In the early years, I’d share an idea I was really excited about and expected maybe ten people to read it. I recalibrated my system to expect that. I kept going for the sheer pleasure of experiencing my creativity luxuriating in itself.

This rhythm was essential in helping me cultivate a sense of trust and fluidity in thinking, drawing, and writing. I developed a fast pace and rigorous relationship to my ideas. It was also a process of un-censoring, de-programming, and de-perfectionism.

Most days, I showed up to the blank screen and had no idea what I was going to create. I allowed the ideas to have their own momentum and direction, and each time I gave them permission to exist, they multiplied.

This practice helped me understand what my work is about—the themes, philosophies, and concepts that form the skeleton of my work. Each day’s entry felt random, nonlinear, and chaotic until I zoomed out, and looked at it over the time scale of years.

You share podcast episodes, animations, travel diaries, zines, dreams, and more in your digital world. Is there anything that doesn’t go in this space?

I often talk about the private/public as not being a binary. It’s not an on/off switch; it’s more like a dance of the veils. I don’t have a hard rule about what I keep private, but I have a clear felt sense that I always honor. This boundary changes, depending on the season. In general, I do tend to be more personal in my letters. The inbox is a private place, after all.

I share what I feel ready to metabolize, in public. While my vulnerability threshold is pretty high, many forms of metabolism do need to happen in darkness—and maybe, I’ll share pieces of it, in abstracted, poetic, veiled ways. Sometimes I need months to pass before writing about difficult experiences. Time is also a veil.

Kening’s seasonal community Labyrinth Library

In a recent Labyrinth Library session, you mentioned that you luxuriate in the process of writing by pretending that no one’s going to read it. What is your balance of writing for readers and writing for yourself? How do you meet your desire to be seen by seeing yourself first?

There is no balance for me. I am always, mostly writing for myself. I write to think and find out what I believe about a topic. I write to metabolize and document what I’m feeling, knowing I’ll probably forget it soon.

Even if people ask me about X topic, I won’t (I can’t) write about it unless I feel excited enough to grapple with it, in the spaciousness of my solitude. Sometimes their excitement gives me the energy to write. But when the energy is done, I have to move on. In the past, I’ve tried being more strategic about writing for readers—but then it felt like a chore, and killed the energy.

How often do you go through your own archives? How have these archives been beneficial to your creative practice?

My archives is, by far, the page I visit most on my website. I kind of think I built that page just for me to “command-F” keywords to see if I’ve written about a particular topic before (because I often forget). I go to my archives at least a few times a week to see how a new thread or node of thought connects to an existing web. I link the threads in this very slow, organic way.

I curate pieces from my archives in each newsletter. This practice helps me feel the shape of my emotional and intellectual journey over the years. Things I made that didn’t make any sense back then make sense now. This feels tender and deeply satisfying, like a continual homecoming.

This interview is part of Quietly Public, a series about sharing without performing one’s self on the internet. What does being quietly public mean to you?

To me, being quietly public means to share on the internet as if you’re just alone in a room, thinking or making something for yourself. Which, often times, is what you’re physically doing.

The internet is also just a room. The fact that people can see you doesn’t need to change anything—it only changes how your mind and nervous system feels about it. I imagine that my internet room is made from black glass.

Despite what social platforms have trained us to expect, most of the time, when you share something, nothing happens—at least, not immediately. This can feel like panic, or it can feel peaceful. Silence can feel like an extension of your body existing, being, breathing in this room. The work is embracing this quietness, and maybe, listening to it.

Thank you Kening! You can dive deeper into Kening’s body of work through her web world, newsletter, and podcast, botanical studies of internet magic. She also teaches courses on creativity, internet, and business, and facilitates the seasonal community Labyrinth Library.

Until next time,