Today we’d like to introduce you to Litong Zeng.
Hi Litong, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I am currently working as a freelance illustrator and digital artist. But this is something I couldn’t have imagined before. Until the age of 16, I followed the set path as most children born in China – there seemed to be only one path for me to follow: get into a good university, get a good job, find a good partner, get married, have children, and then meet my death. This was the path I was expected to follow, like a mannequin produced on a factory assembly line; I was the epitome of thousands of students, and we all had the “same face”. Although I was admitted to the city’s top high school according to other’s expectations, I could not rest on my laurels, and I was always attracted to the more marginal things, for a long time, I was obsessed with literature, poetry, and music……. I loved all the “useless things”, and tried to hide in the world of art and philosophy, which was my happy place. I didn’t want to be quantified and represented by a set of numbers. So, I started to create. I believe thinking and creating is the only way to feel my own uniqueness.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I was born in a coastal town, and I used to think that no one knew the sea better than I did. The sea in my hometown was all mixed up with mud, plastic, and garbage. If you dive into it, a big muddy current would be rolled up. The harder I swam, the blurrier it became. I had never seen a blue sea. But somebody would swim until the water turned blue, whereas I never believed there was such thing as a blue sea – it was mostly dark green mixed with some blackened cyan, a color that could not be called “blue” at all. I thought the sea was supposed to be yellowish and chapped, like the back of my grandmother’s hand, like me, a sickening legacy of the previous generation.
It wasn’t until I began to flee my hometown that I realized how wrong I was.
In the last year of my journey towards adulthood, I resisted my father’s expectations of me. If I had taken the exams like most ordinary students, I might have been able to get into a good university and choose a so-called popular major. But my desire to escape had reached an extreme …… imagining a conforming future, I felt incredibly lonely. In China, many high schools do not enroll students in art majors, and there is no corresponding training, only some basic-level art appreciation classes. The top high schools emphasize the promotion rate, and the curriculum is so tight that art is regarded as “not a proper profession”. So I was just studying as an ordinary student in school…… but at that time, I borrowed the key to the art classroom from the teacher, and I would always sneak into the classroom after the afternoon session or sit on my bed and draw during the short breaks in the noon. Sometimes I didn’t do much, maybe just open a picture book, novel, or book of poetry and escape into the short peace. Eventually, I went off on my own to study art in another city, and as a non-art student, I was admitted to a famous art academy in Beijing. To my surprise, my alma mater finally began to enroll art students and opened professional art training after my exploits…… Being able to see my schoolmates relying on what they love to go further after me, to a different life, I am really proud of them.
Even though my hometown is a laid-back, comfortable town, I still long to run away to get on a bus with no destination and just go anywhere. Maybe instead of running away, it’s more like I’m throwing myself away, from the south to the north, to another land, to the other side of the morning and evening line. It wasn’t just a physical escape; it was also a spiritual one. I believe that only in this way can I see the true color of the sea.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Working as a digital artist gradually fascinated me with stories.
In the process of “escaping from my hometown”, I began to build a dynamic vision. My work is often characterized by an obsession with narrative, and unlike most traditional narrative techniques, I always want to pursue a dynamic narrative.
I have experimented with painting, text, sound… any medium I know to convey endless stories. At the same time, I realize that the beauty of the narrative method itself is what appeals to me the most. A well-crafted narrative can make an ordinary story unexpectedly intriguing, just like puzzles, drawing people to experience, interpret, and resonate with countless times. That is why I chose the medium with the most possibilities among all of them – interaction. Interactive narrative is a dialog, an invisible connection, a game, and a gamble between the creator and the participant. At what moment narratives will be out of control? To what extent the participant can take initiative from the creator? Just like some kind of virtual intimacy, it allows the beauty of narrative to be born with the cooperation in another dimension.
Moreover, my obsession with narratives comes from the desire to “understand”. The dislocation of reason and emotion, the dysfunction of socialization, the torment of the unknowable, and the incapability from my childhood have made me long for understanding and being understood. At first, I tried to understand the world, to learn about anything that interested me, but I soon realized that the hardest thing to understand is other people. I couldn’t believe that people would truly understand each other, and I couldn’t help but query: does speaking the same language make us understand each other? Do the same experiences make us understand each other? Can love make us understand each other? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but certainly not everyone can be understood in this way. I agree with the idea that people are islands; sometimes our blocks collide, and sometimes we are separated; although we are all connected to the same planet, we are shaped so differently that a small “invasion of foreign species” can be devastating.
But I don’t want to give up on understanding or being understood. So, I turned my attention to the belongings of humans – the narratives about objects. Over the past year, I have been constructing narratives with people’s everyday objects, trying to transform the physical “daily things” into the digital “non-daily things”, to bring people’s feelings about the everyday life symbolized by the objects. People can project their feelings towards objects, and on the other hand, due to the universality of most everyday objects, they can evoke a wider range of empathy. However, I recognize that individuality in emotion is also essential. Genuine, personal narratives are much more touching than generalized, universal narratives, which makes it closer to my goal. Therefore, I try to expand my narrative material, including other people’s stories of objects, as part of the narrative subject. Using the object as a bridge and the narrative as the core is my effort to achieve mutual understanding between people. In my future creations, I will continue to take the narrative of objects as the main line to practice my interactive aesthetics.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I am open to cooperation. Anyone can communicate or discuss with me through various platforms.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://noey.cargo.site/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/noeynuoyi/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/litong-zeng-b6370a275/
