Conversations with Mingyi Gan

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mingyi Gan.

Hi Mingyi, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in Wuhan, the one permanently stamped into the global imagination as the COVID epicenter, a city whose temperament seeps into its air the way humidity saturates a summer shirt, dense and irritable and sticking to your skin whether you want it or not. The streets smelled of barbecue smoke tangled with gasoline, conversations snapped like rubber bands, and people moved with the kind of urgency that made hesitating feel like a small failure. My first lessons in survival came from that atmosphere; I learned to read a scene in the time it takes for a traffic light to flicker, to speak directly, to trust the instincts that flared before thought could catch up. In a place like that, art felt like something other people had the luxury to consider.
At eighteen, I left for New York with the instinctive thought that if I didn’t leave now, I would suffocate. New York confronts you with a different kind of urgency. Every corner holds someone faster, sharper, or hungrier than you, and instead of fear I felt a strange relief, because it meant I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t built for velocity myself. I don’t spend as much time drawing as people assume; most days I wander the city because boredom hunts me quickly and constantly, and New York offers enough free distractions, lectures, protests, late-night screenings, open studios, to feel like a breathing organism whose arteries you can step into whenever you want. That freedom and the sense that you can contribute to something larger than your own survival, especially in fights for human rights, made this city the only place I was willing to endure hardship for. And since I’m far from wealthy, I had to invent my own methods of staying afloat.
My current reality, though, feels stripped of any aesthetic pretense. I’m chasing rent, piecing together O-1 paperwork, calculating how to stay another year, maybe two if I’m lucky. Some days I move as if the essential questions about art have sunk underwater, quiet and unreachable. But I’m still grateful for the instinct Wuhan drilled into me, the ability to diagnose a situation in a fraction of a second.
The Marvel cover arrived in my inbox after Tom Brevoort finally responded to an email I had sent months earlier. The exhilaration was sharp, but the sensation of fulfilling a childhood dream arrived strangely out of focus. The power and heat I once imagined now materialize in contracts, deadlines, and commercial logic, which is its own lesson in adulthood: that the dreams you chase eventually reshape themselves into paperwork before they become anything else. Within the narrow constraints of time and money, I extract whatever fragments of romance I can, dropping small measures of idealism into the routines of daily life, hoping they don’t evaporate too quickly.
Even though the situation remains difficult, my work is finally threading into something like a trajectory. Only a few months after graduation, I completed two Marvel variant covers and a Fortnite loading screen. I hesitate to attribute all of this to my own effort, because I’ve sent the same thousand cold emails as so many friends who are just as talented and still struggling. To claim achievement without acknowledging luck feels careless, even privileged. Still, I hold on to the belief that events fall into place with a kind of hidden logic. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism, but it’s one I’m unwilling to discard.
This is the part where I’m supposed to articulate my artistic path or gesture toward some grand long-term aspiration, but the truth is simpler and far less poetic. My goals right now are immediate: secure the O-1 visa, pay rent, and keep drawing because drawing is the only way I know to make any of it possible.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Money, visas, even the unspoken rules of the industry are, at this point, predictable inconveniences. They circle my life like background noise, irritating but manageable, even occasionally useful as fuel. And after years of premature independence, I’ve learned a few of their patterns, though not without resentment. Those hurdles don’t frighten me; sometimes they even offer a strange sense of competence, a reminder that most practical problems can be solved with enough persistence or compromise.
What unsettles me far more are the fractures between people, the quiet shifts you can’t articulate or repair, especially when they occur in relationships you once believed were steady. The kind where the more carefully you try to hold things intact, the faster they slip apart.
Something happened recently that dismantled a part of my emotional architecture. I once trusted someone with the kind of softness you only allow when you’re too young to understand how reality corrodes idealism. We moved through the East Village at night, our shadows stretched thin by fluorescent lights, and I believed proximity alone could keep things from breaking. We did all the things that belong to the domain of the ordinary and the intimate: Chinese New Year dumplings in a cramped kitchen, wandering through Soho trying on clothes we couldn’t afford before inevitably ending up at Beacon’s Closet, returning to J’s Kitchen every other week for half‑price curry beef. Life felt specific with her, textured, full of small rituals that made the years feel less ruthless.
And then I learned how she spoke about me to other people. She reduced me, with remarkable ease, to someone who deliberately put pressure on everyone around me. A presence too sharp, too capable, too something. None of it had anything to do with the sink I didn’t clean fast enough, or the bathtub, or even the hair I shed on the carpet. What stung was the erasure of everything that had once mattered, as if the years could be rewritten in a sentence.
I cycled through anger and self‑doubt with embarrassing frequency. For a moment I blamed her for misunderstanding me. Then I blamed myself for being too sharp, too intense, too visibly ambitious. I would have preferred she told me directly, even if it meant shouting, rather than allowing me to discover her revised version of me through other mouths.
But I still refuse to believe she stopped caring. Accepting that feels heavier than blaming the world, so I blamed the world instead. Maybe the city did it. Maybe the era did. Could it be that AI has eroded human relationships in this era more precarious like walking on thin ice? Perhaps, at this point, I should revise my answer to this question to the most obvious and also the most truthful one: AI is the greatest obstacle for artists.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Because in other previous interviews I was too formal and many of my answers ended up sounding similar, I approached the first two questions from a very personal perspective. For this question, I will return to a more official, professional tone.
I am Mingyi Gan, a New York–based illustrator, graphic designer, and book artist. I specialize in vibrant, fashionable compositions that combine strong anatomical modeling, dynamic line work, and layered surrealist storytelling. My work explores time, space, and the narrative possibilities of visual imagery, creating compositions that are simultaneously imaginative and precise.
I am known for integrating illustration with principles drawn from graphic design, architecture, fashion, and other fields. What sets me apart is my ability to translate these diverse aesthetics into a coherent visual system, an illustration language informed by everything I observe and absorb. I continuously build and refine my sensibilities, and I have never once felt “good enough.” That restlessness keeps me moving; I hope even at forty (if I live till then) I still think this way.
I am most proud of maintaining a distinct voice across disciplines, illustration, design, and book arts, while still pushing myself forward with every project. My collaborations have included Marvel and Epic Games, and my self‑published works, such as NOVISION and Lady Silkworm, have been recognized by multiple major institutions.

What does success mean to you?
Success has always been something that moves just as I approach it. Sometimes I imagine a narrow four-story East Village building, thin as a cat stretched into a corner, or like a smashburger patty, sandwiched between a decades-old Italian grocery and a bakery that dies every three months. I imagine drinking coffee brewed with Devocion beans in that building, then renting out the rooftop pool for $150 an hour.
I also know I may never afford that building. So I gave myself a “makeshift success”: if my abilities are limited, my luck mediocre, my timing off, at the very least, I should be able to support myself and not get swept out of New York. That too is success, staying in the arena with adequate dignity.
And there’s a deeper kind of success, being satisfied with myself. It sounds simple, but it’s a dangerous key. Most East Asian kids never achieve it, and I accepted years ago that I probably never will. Satisfaction feels like a pause, and I’m afraid pausing will dull my edge and take away the force that keeps me moving forward. As I said in response to the previous question, never believing myself “good enough” has been a kind of fuel, one I am not yet willing to pause. So I keep telling myself, everything happens for the best.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mingyigan.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/magierk8/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/magierk
• Twitter: https://x.com/mingyigan