Rising Stars: Meet Zhiyu You

Today we’d like to introduce you to Zhiyu You.

Hi Zhiyu, 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 was born in Shenzhen, China. Born at the time of the opening and rapid rise of this small coastal town, everything foreign is particularly new to this small burgeoning city, and the diversified growth background also has an imperceptible impact on my future life choices.

For my art career, my father greatly influenced me in the early days. My father’s profession had nothing to do with art, but his biggest hobby is nature photography. When I was a child, he would often take me to Shenzhen mangroves to photograph various birds and plants during winter and summer vacations, and I was responsible for recording all the birds and plants. I recorded them in my way, drawing with colored pencils. This is the happiest thing for me. My parents support me a lot. My father encouraged me to move everything I saw in nature into my drawing and painted nature with colored pencils and drawing boards. Captured beautiful scenery, animals, and plants.

Aware that I liked to draw, they found me a good art teacher to teach me systematically. After graduating from high school, I studied at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts for a year, but I found that I didn’t like the art system under the exam-oriented education, so I decided to come to the United States to study illustration, and I studied at the School of Visual Arts as an undergraduate and now graduated as a professional illustrator, Tattoo artist, and visual artist.

And now, I turn my attention to some social phenomena. I hope that some existing social problems can be conveyed through my works.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
For me, the creation of art should not be smooth. I don’t like to stay in my comfort zone, I like to challenge myself in my creations, experimenting with different mediums and themes. Keep trying to break through the barriers and have a chemical reaction with more new things.

Dippen, traditional ink, acrylic ink, watercolor, digital painting, Chinese characters, tattoo. I try to step out of my comfort zone when I feel like everything is going too well.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
In my work, I try to bring a view of the world from a female perspective. Focusing on the hidden, undetected emotions beneath the surface of women’s daily lives.

During my process of growth, many families still have a strong sense of son preference in China. When I was still studying in China, many of the girls in my class had brothers at home. Their family will need a boy to inherit the family, and the mother still needs to give birth to a boy after giving birth to many girls to improve her family status. Because in some areas, mothers who do not have sons are disrespected in the family. Fortunately, I was born into a family where my parents didn’t devalue me because I am a girl. But there are still many female friends around me who are still struggling and treated unfairly by society and family because they are girls. I hope that through my work, I can help girls who are still being treated unfairly.

My series of Hell Scene Paintings are inspired by the ancient Chinese book Hell Scene Painting, in which I fuse the expressions of hell in Buddhist scriptures to connect modern life with the “imprisonment” of women in ancient culture. Thus I can highlight the plight and unfair treatment suffered by women in the development of the times.

I tried to use light and bright colors to make hell less scary for the viewer. The “hell” is integrated with Chinese culture and modern elements. Such as induction cookers, coffee cups, steamers, etc. Express the realistic contradictions of modern society in a humorous form, supplemented by oriental culture. Express concern for women and children. As the Japanese novelist Akutagawa Ryunosuke said, “Life is more hellish than hell itself.”.

Focusing on women is a constant theme in my paintings. The new work “Girls” series will start with daily life and whimsy, and express the emotions of women in the form of dialog boxes, add Chinese characters to my drawings so that they appear in my work in the form of decoration, making my work look between illustration and comics. Conveying women’s dreams and expectations.

The “Bible Series” is inspired by the seven deadly sins in the Bible. Gluttony and laziness most often occur in my own life. It is also the one that most often appears in people’s modern life. I tell this story through the eyes of an Asian woman. I find it very interesting to combine Western biblical culture with stories of Oriental girls.

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
I want to draw more attention to women in society. Everyone in modern society has different pressures, and not everyone can understand the pressures of different groups.

I hope that the “women’s vision” will be constructed in multiple forms, and information will be recorded with the creative method of artistic narrative. In my work, I hope to create a world that cares for women and integrate the details of daily life with creation to form an artistic language.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.zhiyuyou.net
• Instagram: zyuyou_art

Image Credits
Zhiyu You