In India, a woman returned home after an exhausting day and shut herself in her room. Her younger brother walked in and asked her, “What’s wrong?” She did not know what to say, but she was clearly down.
The boy thought for a while. Then he remembered a whimsical illustration his sister once shared with him, showing a fox holding a “happiness balloon” in its hands. He asked her, “Don’t you have a happiness balloon in your hands?”
The illustration that the siblings saw on the JangandFox Instagram page is the work of Singapore-based Joanne Ang Min Jia, who never set out to be anything more than a recreational artist drawing for herself.
But that story—shared by the woman to tell Ms Ang how a child could relate to her joyful art—is a testament to how Ms Ang’s doodles of animals uttering pithy nuggets of wisdom have unexpectedly brought comfort to thousands of people, from Singapore to India to Germany, who have stumbled upon her page.
The “accidental” entrepreneur also ran her art studio, JangandFox, full-time as a business for seven years, serving clients who saw value in tying their brand to her artwork and selling merchandise from postcards (the bestsellers) to notepads to sticker packs and books. Jang stands for Joanne Ang, while the fox is inspired by a hand-sewn fox toy she acquired from a Tbilisi toymaker.
Said Ms Ang, who now runs JangandFox as its Chief Enchantment Officer alongside a more staid full-time role as a senior manager, “In hindsight, art has been my love language. I started a simple page for me to share my thoughts and build connections through my art, and that evolved organically because something in those stories resonated with people. Love, wonder and courage became the recurring themes, not by design, but perhaps because these are universal values that remind people of what we still share in an increasingly turbulent world.”
INSTINCT TO SERVE
For most graduates, the transition from university to the workforce is when life priorities emerge. Ms Ang quickly realised that what mattered to her was not so much financial success or climbing high on the corporate ladder but doing work that served people and society.
“It was quite instinctive,” said Ms Ang, who received the Special Book Prize in Communications and New Media in AY2012/2013, awarded to the best student in the department and recognising her community work. This included bringing together a group of 160 student volunteers to start the student chapter of Operation Smile, now part of the Smile Asia network, which supports children with cleft lips and facial conditions.
“My mother has always been my quiet role model of kindness and generosity, and that guided my first volunteering experience with the elderly when I was in Secondary One. Serving others became deeply ingrained in who I am since then.”
That clarity led her to her first job at the National Youth Council (NYC), where she spent 4 ½ years working on programmes to engage youth in active citizenry.
ACCIDENTAL ENTREPRENEUR
When she left her job at NYC, she had nothing lined up—a move she refers to in Chinese as 裸辭 (luo ci, to resign without a backup plan). In the months she planned for travel and reflection, she found herself returning to her childhood drawing hobby.
A self-taught artist who learnt how to refine her art through online videos, she began posting her work on Instagram because friends asked her to. From a few hundred likes for her first post in July 2018, the likes pipped the 10,000 mark just three months later and marked a high of 50,000 followers. Her most popular post has 391,000 likes.
Her art wasn’t just cute; it moved hearts. Said one comment, “Your art has made me feel less lonely on really cloudy days.” It was particularly resonant during the COVID-19 pandemic when people felt more isolated, and Ms Ang reckons that what she learnt at NUS—about how to communicate meaning in a globalised world—helped in her messaging.
Interestingly, the JangandFox content first became popular with people outside of Singapore and was featured in American and German news outlets before finding local traction.
Then corporate clients like F&B outlets, wellness clinics, community organisations and even NUS came knocking, offering to pay her to draw for their brands, run giveaway campaigns or put up a sponsored post on her page.
That was when she decided to register her business, which was sufficiently successful to help Ms Ang pay the bills.
It also enabled Ms Ang to use her artistic talent to support organisations such as the Alzheimer’s Disease Association (Singapore), Make-A-Wish Singapore, and Samaritans of Singapore (SOS). A recent collaboration with Mr Bean, for which JangandFox created exclusive designs for a tumbler set, raised funds for Smile Asia, further demonstrating how her work can combine creativity with social impact.
“Without having a boss, structure or guidance which you would find in a full-time job, it took me about two years to figure things out and I really had to rely on my personal compass,” said Ms Ang. “Part of that was figuring out how to balance working for causes I care about with building something financially sustainable. Today, the studio bridges both, collaborating with brands and organisations in support of fundraising projects and storytelling campaigns. This connection of my two passions—art and service—is what keeps me going.”
BUILDING AN INCLUSIVE STUDIO
In May 2025, Ms Ang returned to full-time work at SG Enable—the focal agency for disability in Singapore—where she runs programmes for the public on disability inclusion.
While her practical consideration is that a stable salary will help her to shoulder payments for her mother’s new home, her work at SG Enable will give her the knowledge to turn JangandFox into an inclusive studio.
She said, “I work with people from marginalised communities and there is a lot of creative potential. My dream now is to grow JangandFox Studio into an inclusive storytelling and illustration studio that tells the stories of people that often go unnoticed, and to bring their work to a bigger market.”
At the same time, she has joined the Franchising and Licensing Association to help strengthen Singapore’s IP edge—so that the characters she and other Singapore artists create can be monetised and recognised internationally, similar to other character brands from Taiwan and Hong Kong, and to prevent others from copying.
She said, “We want to bring our stories to wider audiences, and it’s also a kind of cultural export from Singapore to the rest of the world.”
Indeed, by continuing to follow her instinct to draw, she is creating a world where everyone is invited to hold their own happiness balloon.
