MDes Communication Design School of Design
Yanxi Li
Yanxi Li is an illustrator who explores the narratives of memory. Metaphor is used to relate additional themes and layers within these narratives. Her visual language draws on process, digital and analogue, employing a range of media to relate her stories.
Currently, Yanxi Li is working on an autobiographical comic and animation. Both of which address issues of loss, memory and the transition to adulthood, as she engages in dialogue with her younger self to gain understanding.
Dogged by The Past
“When I met my 10-year-old self, a creature with my 14-year-old face and a familiar dog body, in the Glasgow flat where I live, we have a conversation about my own life, my parents, and my views on death.”
To present this story in the form of comics, I hope people will be engaged by the comic and try to find joy in life and cherish the people around them. Through my story, I wanna reflect on a common contradiction between millennial teenagers and their parents in Chinese families — Parental discipline is a kind of harm in the eyes of children. I don’t want to discuss the best way to be a parent.
In this volume, as the prelude to the long story, I present a story about my regrets, and I want to emphasise that things that have happened cannot be changed, even if I had the chance to meet my past self.
羽人( Feathered People)
When I lost my cousin Chengcheng last year, I fell into a deep sadness. I talked to my mother. She said my cousin will go into the afterworld. How would it look like…
羽人, which I translated to ‘feathered people’, is a kind of creature in Chinese myth that would serve the people in the afterworld, since 2,300 years ago. I recreated this creature and imagined that they are working in the afterworld and guiding the spirits to be reborn.
