Constructing The Intangible Conceptual Illustration

The inspiration came from a childhood moment of smelling pomelo blossoms — that fleeting, uncatchable sensation made me wonder: what actually is memory? Not an archive waiting to be opened, but something that's continuously being constructed. I wanted to give that invisible inner experience a visible form.

I'm continuing to explore "intangible perception." Right now I'm working on a series of interactive visual pieces that combine code and frame-by-frame animation, trying to translate the small, easily overlooked moments of everyday life into visual language.

The conceptual phase took quite a long time, I kept tearing things down and starting over. But once the theme was firmly established, the final work came together in one continuous flow.

It didn’t arrive as a single revelation. I was deep in visual research when I noticed that construction imagery, cranes and scaffolding and exposed grids, carried something that organic forms couldn’t: a built-in sense of incompleteness. A building site is always mid-process. That felt structurally honest to what olfactory memory actually does. A scent doesn’t return a finished picture. It triggers a partial, ongoing reassembly, something still being built every time it’s accessed. Once I saw that parallel, the architectural vocabulary stopped being a stylistic choice and became a conceptual one. The language of construction gave me a way to show memory not as something retrieved but as something under continuous, imperfect reconstruction.

Designers tend to assume that if they can find the right image, they can make an internal experience legible. This framework disrupts that. If memory is genuinely reconstructive, then no single visual can claim to be the definitive version of what someone felt or remembered. That’s a humbling realization for anyone working in visual communication. It means the illustrator’s job isn’t to pin down an interior experience but to build a structure that leaves room for the viewer’s own reconstruction to happen inside it. And when the subject matter is this intimate, the ethical weight is real. You’re not illustrating someone else’s nostalgia. You’re proposing a model for how remembering works, and that model will shape how people understand their own recall. The responsibility is to stay honest about the instability of what you’re depicting, not to make it look more resolved than it actually is.

I never started with a complete sketch. The piece was built the way memory itself behaves: one element suggested the next, and each addition revised what came before. The contrast at the heart of the work emerged gradually, not by plan. Petals are soft, scent is formless, recollection blurs at the edges, yet the structures that carry them in the composition, scaffolding, staircases, grid lines, are rigid and precise. I didn’t choose that tension deliberately from the beginning. It revealed itself as I worked. I’d place something architectural and realize it needed something organic to breathe against, or I’d soften an area and find it had lost its meaning without a harder edge nearby. The compositional system grew through that back-and-forth. Drafts were discarded, elements were rebuilt, whole sections were rethought. In the end, the process mirrored the concept: nothing was retrieved intact from an original plan. Everything was reconstructed along the way, and sometimes the work carried me somewhere I hadn’t anticipated at all.