Joanna Liang Navigates Hope and Hardship Under Mentor Aaron Friend Lettner

A recent apprenticeship with artist Aaron Friend Lettner saw ECU student Joanna Liang (BFA 2025) contribute to a wide array of projects focused around storytelling through images.

Under Aaron’s mentorship, Joanna assisted with bookmaking, workshops, a photographic card deck and related zine — the latter illustrated and designed by Joanna — and an exhibition poster.

Aaron says this wide-ranging focus was aimed at demonstrating more than the hard skills necessary to produce a finished work.

“The reality for many people who are trying to make a living as an artist is you have to do many different things, patch it together,” he says. “That felt like part of the learning: what can an artist’s life look like? There’s such a variety of things required to make this work financially. We tried to bring all of those into our time together.”

For Joanna, this approach was not only illuminating but addressed some of the unspoken questions she held as an emerging artist.

“Sometimes I worry. Everyone talks about the starving artist stereotype; that you can’t make it as an artist.” she says. “But a window into the different possibilities for living as an artist made me feel more hopeful and gave me the resources to start looking in specific places I might want to go to in the future.”

Joanna and Aaron were linked through the Art Apprenticeship Network (AAN), a program run by the Shumka Centre for Creative Entrepreneurship and funded by the RBC Foundation to support RBC Emerging Artists. The AAN pairs paid student apprentices with established artists, curators and cultural workers each year to work on specific projects.

Their collaboration included several highlights, including the Being Illuminated zine, created by Joanna as an extension of Aaron’s gorgeous Book of Light photographic card deck. The project came about after Joanna produced poster illustrations for Aaron’s related exhibition at Capture Photography Festival earlier in 2024. Aaron was so impressed, he asked Joanna to create a zine with further illustrations based on his photography as a “solo design project.” The zine gave Joanna comprehensive experience producing a risograph-printed edition, including working with Moniker Press on the final publication.

Both Joanna and Aaron also point to their appearance at the Vancouver Art Book Fair, where they presented Being Illuminated, as a high point.

“That was a great experience,” Joanna says. “I really enjoyed seeing all that variety in one place and also being able to share my work and talk about it.”

“It was really sweet to see the praise for Joanna’s illustrations,” Aaron adds. “People who didn’t know either of us were responding really enthusiastically not only to the collaboration, but to the quality of the illustrations. I’d never imagined the photographs existing in that form. So, that felt like a gift for me.”

But not everything went smoothly, he adds. The Book of Light card deck was completed during Joanna’s apprenticeship, but Aaron had been working on it for most of the previous decade. And the final stages, which revolved around printing the deck, proved to be the most challenging by far.

“It just wouldn’t end,” Aaron says of the printing process. “There were so many obstacles. I’ve never experienced such consistent derailing. It was dispiriting. But I also felt like it rounded out the apprenticeship by including what happens when things don’t go as expected.”

Joanna likewise saw the experience as a full spectrum learning opportunity. She says her coursework often focused on artistic development, sometimes to the detriment of understanding the nuts and bolts of working as a professional artist. The AAN apprenticeship helped her fill in those blanks.

“This program is an opportunity to get a better idea of what it’s like to balance practicalities like grant writing and print deadlines with artistic vision,” she says. “And it was insightful for me to see all the production hiccups. It was a pain for Aaron, but it was great to learn how to resolve issues when things go wrong and see that it’s possible to make things work despite the obstacles.”

“I’m very grateful for it and I wish it could continue,” Aaron says of the apprenticeship. “A big priority for me was providing learning experiences I never had as a younger artist. Some of that can be taught, but many things are felt and accrued through experience. I’ve so often been on the receiving end of that. So, I appreciate when a person takes it seriously and sees it as a sacred contract.”

Visit Aaron’s website to learn more about his work and purchase your copy of Book of Light.

Learn more about Joanna’s practice via her website and Instagram

Visit the Shumka Centre online to see more of their extraordinary range of programming.

Visit ECU online to learn more about studying Visual Arts at Emily Carr University.