Jiaxin Lin
My Art and Common Themes Among Them
Initially, I came to Bowling Green to pursue a career in animation and eventually character design for any major animation company but through my experiences working on animation and understanding my role in a large company as a opposed to a smaller company. I found that my interest and focus shifted, instead of working in animation I would like to pursue a career in illustrations either digitally or traditionally and video editing as well as in special effects.
My primary mediums I like to use are mostly Adobe products and I sometimes use illustrator, depending on the task required for me but I usually gravitate towards Photoshop. My work currently consists of portraits of people, but they are all very stylized to cartoonish drawings and paintings. I also tend to use a mixture of blues and greens in my piece with sometimes a bit of warm colors to add a nice contrast. However, I am slowly pulling myself away from that and I am slowly working towards to portraying more of Chinese culture into my art and illustrating more of Chinese cultures such as folklore and stories that I grew up listening and enjoying as a child. I also would like to film more videos that explore the topic of identity and videos that would reflect myself and about being Asian American. Growing up like many others I felt I wasn’t given enough diversity in media and the type of art that I consumed as a child and I want to change that by creating bodies of work that reflects myself and my experiences.
Currently there isn’t much distinction between my bodies of work as oppose to others at least in my opinion because I wasn’t being personal and allowing myself to be vulnerable, in the past my work was created for the sole purpose of being pretty or looks good compositionally but there was no meaning behind it that I could connect with. Thus, many of my work I never liked or enjoyed. However, through me slowly realizing my problem and my fear of showing me as a person I am working on showing that starting with a topic that I feel that is very important to me and that screams me, being Chinese and growing up as a first-generation Chinese with parents that literally came over with nothing and no prior knowledge of American culture.
I follow a lot of artists but one artist that I love and can connect with is a Chinese artist by the name of Tanxuan, he’s an illustrator from Shenzhen China. Tanxuan illustrates a variety of illustrations and is commissioned for a variety of work but from what I’ve seen on his Instagram he is best known for his intricate mural painting of Asian related foods to illustrating his observation of the daily life of people in China. Tanxuan also draws portraits of women, perhaps some of these women are people he knows or of strangers. I don’t know because his entire Instagram is in Chinese, but I really enjoy them cause of the details and attention he puts into his graphite drawings and mural paintings. His color palette and what he typically seems to go for currently are black and white with a small pop of color, but his earlier works were more colorful, many pastel pinks, blues, yellows, and some saturated colors.
I personally feel connected with his piece because he draws scenes of everyday life in China, and I want to do something like that, I want to illustrate things about myself and my culture to the people around me. My identity has become a very big part of myself and how I am today is mostly due to the fact I grew up as an Asian American with first generation parents. And for the longest time, I hated the fact I was Chinese and felt a disconnect between myself and my family members.
A few of his work that I really like, the first and third one are observations and the second and fourth one are drawings of plants but I like them cause there are so many details and some of details I see are related to chinese folklore.
