Check Out Ruoyu Chen’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ruoyu Chen.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I’ve always been drawn to stories-whether it be other people’s stories or telling my own stories. Finding the right media for story-telling, however, took some trials. I was determined to be a writer until high school, but then I decided to exploit my interest in art. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and spent four years training for illustration. At one point, I realized that I wanted my narrative to be heard by and to influence as many people as possible, and still images might not be the most effective way. Around that time I was also given the advice that it would be really cool to see my drawings move, and that inspired me to decide to take an animation class in junior year. I immediately fell in love with the storytelling potential of this medium.

As one of my animation teachers put it at the end of class, animation only has a little over a hundred years of history, and it is still a baby in comparison to all the other art forms. The medium is full of possibilities. I was so motivated by that statement that I decided to dive head-first into this field. Although illustration and animation are fairly closely related, I still decided that I needed more experience and training in this field. During my last year at RISD, I took as many animation classes as possible, and eventually decided to go to a graduate school program that would allow me more time to become fully trained in the field, as well as expose myself to as many new technologies in animation as possible. I applied for the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Southern California, and I’m now about to start my last year in this program. I am very appreciative of the journey that I undertook; I find all my past experiences, all my curiosities and explorations done in the past, have found a way to shape the artist that I am today.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I was lucky enough to always have family and friends supporting me throughout my career, and did not face much external struggles. However, I did have personal struggles to overcome. Constantly surrounded by some of the most talented people in the world, it’s hard to not feel inadequate. I’ve always been competitive growing up, but in the art world, it’s never helpful to compare yourself to others. Everyone is unique in their own way, and that is the lesson that I, unfortunately, learned the hard way. During my first few years in college, I was completely overwhelmed by artists around me– artists who have spent years in training, who knew they wanted to be artists at an early age and kept perfecting their craft since then. It took some time adjusting and accepting that everyone has their own pace and their own voice, and it’s ok for me to not excel in everything. Once I jumped out of that trap, I was able to better understand and analyze myself as an artist. I went back to drawing, and I tried to just enjoy the process of drawing without stressing out about making it a masterpiece. I find myself once again finding the passion I had for art in the first place; I was able to truly express myself and find something unique, and more importantly, be genuinely proud of what I made.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m still primarily an illustrator and designer, most of my work is pre-production visualization and design. I strongly believe in telling stories through my images, and I find a lot of fun in hiding narratives, showing the character’s personalities in the details. During the last few months, I’ve also been doing a lot of work with Augmented Reality. I find it to be the perfect medium for me to express my creativity, and I want it to be a novel experience to see my work composited onto the real world. It also plays to my strengths as an illustrator, allowing me to design small vignettes that focus on color and design.

Most of my work as a filmmaker has been focusing on children’s narrative, making short films to tell stories from the perspective of a child, and drawing inspiration from my own childhood to discuss how children see the world, especially when facing complex emotional situations such as death. I’m currently working on my graduate thesis film, telling a whimsical story of what a typhoon looks like from the perspective of a little girl.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I was born in a beautiful beach city and was constantly surrounded by its scenery growing up. My hometown as well as my childhood was uneventful, the only exciting thing was that we did get two to three typhoons every summer. These are powerful hurricanes that would occasionally leave the city powerless for days. They were also the source of inspiration for my thesis. People from my hometown are so used to typhoons that they are usually unbothered by them. However, in a weird way, I was always looking forward to events like this that would break the mundane pattern for me.

Other than that, I’ve always been addicted to stories, and I was therefore a fairly bookish kid growing up. With the risk of sounding like a nerd, I read all the novels I could find at home or in school, and I would read the stories over and over again, trying to picture the characters as well as the scenes. When I was thirteen, my parents took me to see Les Miserables the movie, and that changed my life. I started to think more deeply about the world, and in addition to absorbing other people’s stories, I started to contemplate my place in the world and my own narrative to tell.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://roxieillustrations.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ruoyu.art/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roxie-chen-79b601160/