Today we’d like to introduce you to Xiao Lyu.
Hi Xiao, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
Hi! I first started my career as a graphic designer after my undergrad program, and to further develop my possibilities I participated in different artists’ workshops and started to work as a gaming artist mainly focusing on character design and visual advertising. Along with collaborations with different companies and commercial cases, I had more clients coming to me. Then I started to get interested in illustration. It’s also a profession related to visual art but requires more expression and narrative. So, I decided to come to the USA and pursue my MFA in illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC.
Now I provide various visual artistic expressions, ideas, and solutions, with my mixed visual language. I do different visual arts like illustrations for advertising, graphic novels, gaming art, and editorial illustration is also what I’m interested in. And ‘variety’ is what I’m proud of myself for and what my clients feel right about me. I could give multiple possibilities for their visual needs and quickly reach a consensus. Right now, I’m focusing on developing a unique personal style with balanced combinations of abstract and realistic styles that I’m interested in and good at, and its flexibility is what I value.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not Exactly. There’re always new challenges on the way and some of them were more meaningful to me. The first challenge for me was that visual art is a kind of art with a very broad range, and I am a person who cannot keep repeating myself and always wants to try something new. So, when I realized too many options and possibilities were surrounding me, I got the feeling like drowning in these choices lol and meanwhile, kinda at a loss. Where exactly is my place in this world? Graphic designer in an advertising company? Freelance gaming artist? A photographer in a visual studio? Should I keep marketing myself or have an agent? However, this problem could only be resolved by participating in person, no one else could give you the final answers but you, and it took me years to come to where I am now, thanks to all the difficulties and unexpected problems that happened, good or bad, they are all valuable experiences that guided me the direction. The second big struggle for me was the distance between dream and reality. Seems everyone all experienced this kind of lost period after graduating when we were young, cuz we graduated and embraced society with expectations, but society is not always that friendly. I tried many different jobs in different forms, and also ran my own graphic studio with a partner, the not so happy ending of that two-year-old studio gave me valuable memories and lessons, and it also brought out the third difficulty I faced: learning how to be and communicate with different people, sometimes the people close to you or you knew for a very long time won’t be easier to keep the good relationship with than clients. What I feel so lucky about is that I have supportive family and friends accompanying me all along the road here, and helped me realize that if life is a train, we can’t and don’t need to have or keep everybody on board, just try to stay true to yourself.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I see myself as a visual artist, and finding out the shining points of different visual art and expressing them with my own visual language is what I specialize in and am known for. I cannot be satisfied with one single stable visual language which does not change, I’d love to keep myself learning new languages in this amazing and rapidly growing industry, so sometimes it might be a little difficult for people to locate where my focal point is lol. I do notice this might be both an advantage and disadvantage for me, so right now I’m working on my visual thesis with the purpose of finding consistency among the variety and diversity, to further polish my own visual language; also, I admire abstractions while I’m also trying to balance it with realism, I wanna my work to be partly abstract while it still can be interpreted.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I am an artist who really loves and welcomes teamwork. I admire all the shining points of different people, and I don’t care about their skin colors, their religions, or their backgrounds, I just adore the incredible talents I see from them, the mind-blowing ideas they generate, and the kindness and friendliness they have. I’d consider various kinds of great work opportunities, but the first thing I’d consider is how interesting the job is, how much room it will be offered to me to try the best of myself out, and of course, it’d be great if it comes with good money lol. Lastly, I would really appreciate it if the teammates were emotionally stable. Based on my past working experience, people who are too emotional and always bring their personal emotions into work will greatly reduce the efficiency of team collaboration, and a lot of time will be wasted on solving problems that are not related to work. This is probably the most important thing I see about rationality as artists who are usually subjective, sensitive, and sensual .
Feel free to crush me with amazing but solid ideas! And job opportunities! My next step, except to keep on exploring more possibilities of illustration, I’d also love to try cross-media collaborations, I think it would be fantastic to really apply different visual languages from 2D to 3D from digital to traditional mediums together. Feel free to contact me via email.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://xiaolyu.art
- Instagram: https://www.
instagram.com/xiaolyuxiao
Image Credits
Xiao Lyu
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