December 23, 2025
From the Winter 2026 situation of Residing Chicken journal. Subscribe now.
Hawaii-born artist Jon Ching fell in love with portray birds after his companion gave him a e-book of birds in flight about 10 years in the past. “The feathers, the shape, the way in which the sunshine hit,” Ching recollects. “One thing clicked in my mind.”
In 2024 Ching was named an American Chicken Conservancy Conservation and Justice Fellow, resulting in a sequence of flippantly surrealist work depicting the group of imperiled, native birds referred to as the Hawaiian honeycreepers. Some, comparable to Akekee (above), have fewer than 100 birds left of their wild populations.
“Consciousness of the birds in Hawaii is beginning to develop, however once I was rising up, I had no concept. I couldn’t identify one native, endemic fowl,” Ching says. “I attempt to create an emotional connection. … We’re not gonna save them if we don’t have a relationship with them, and even know that they exist.”
