Feng Yitong is an Berlin-based illustrator from Xi\u2019an, China whose comic and hand-drawn imagery addresses migration, cultural shifts and embodied experiences in heavy, tactile forms of oil pastels. Using skills learned from her bachelors and masters degrees in illustration at the Berlin University of the Arts, she sketches her emotive scenes, then scans before using a light table to transfer them onto A4 and A3 paper. Coloured with oil pastels, she achieves her sharp visual effects by using kitchen cloths to remove or mix thick marks to create defined edges and distinct segments of her dense images.<\/p>\n
Exploring how we are shaped by shifts in language, rituals and architecture, her current project is a graphic novel about living between Xi\u2019an and Berlin, navigating two homes through the common imagery of everyday life and scenes from dreams. \u201cI\u2019m drawn to these tiny, real fragments because they shape my life,\u201d says Feng. \u201cDrawing them feels like keeping a diary, but also like transforming the everyday into something dream-like on paper.\u201d There\u2019s a constant play between texts and media, with diary pages and emails making appearances alongside vivid cityscapes, skies and flowers \u2013 all things that day-dreamers get lost in.<\/p>\n
Feng attempts to stay clear from being inspired by other artists in order to preserve her own vision, she comments: \u201cas a creative individual, it\u2019s sometimes rather sad to be influenced by other artists.\u201d Focusing on the immediacy of her surroundings, Feng strengthens the link between the lived experience and the recorded experience, allowing creativity to thrive in the process from fact to fiction. In a way, it\u2019s to capture the often fleeting imagined future of life. \u201cI often think about dreams because living in Berlin was once the dream of my twenties,\u201d says Feng. \u201cNow that I\u2019m here, inside that dream, life sometimes feels unreal \u2013 as if I might wake up at any moment and return to reality. So I try to record the traces of this dream-life, piece by piece.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Feng Yitong is an Berlin-based illustrator from Xi\u2019an, China whose comic and hand-drawn imagery addresses migration, cultural shifts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-234960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}