Interviewe mat Yuanying He

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 was entirely self-initiated — driven purely by my own inspiration, with no external brief or commission.

This series currently exists as an independent artistic work and has not been commercially licensed or mass-produced. I prefer to retain creative control over the work, though I remain open to the right collaborative opportunities in the future.

I have always been drawn to the question of how people perceive and construct a sense of self. For me, design is not only a tool for solving problems — it is also a way of thinking and asking questions.

"Constructing The Intangible" says exactly what the series is about. We can't hold onto memory or store a scent, yet we actively piece these fragments together into who we are right now. The word "constructing" matters. Memory isn't something that just happens to us; it's a form of self-creation we're constantly performing.

Adobe Photoshop and Procreate.

Using symbols with an engineering sensibility, like tower cranes and grids, to build something that is fundamentally fluid and emotional. People usually associate memory with softness and blur. I chose to handle it with a hard, structural language, and that contradiction is really the core of the work.

Finding the right balance between over-explaining and being too obscure. Memory is deeply personal, so if the visual language is too literal it loses its poetry, but if it's too opaque it disconnects from the viewer. Getting the work to carry depth while still being felt was the hardest part.

I wanted the work to go out and be seen by different eyes. The A' Design Award draws jurors from all over the world, and I was curious whether something rooted in personal memory and an Eastern sensory experience could still be understood across cultures.

This work carries a more private meaning for me. It's about how, through growth and loss, we keep asking and answering the question of who we are. I hope everyone who sees it finds their own pomelo blossom, and walks forward carrying that earlier version of themselves.

I began drawing in my early childhood, possessing a heightened sensitivity to aesthetic forms. This wasn't incidental; I believe that when language fails, visual expression remains the most primal and direct mode of communication. My background is a synthesis of formal design training and continuous, self-directed visual practice. I have always been drawn to the intersections of disciplines, such as where graphic design meets motion, where code becomes the brush, or where typography takes on a material texture. What drove me toward design was not a grand ambition, but rather an internal, inevitable necessity for emotional release, born from a need to tangibly externalize an internal world that is seldom at peace.

To me, design is both an ornament and a method for problem-solving; it is the enduring human pursuit of beauty. Design fuses functionality with artistry, playing an indispensable role in contemporary society. It is also a way of seeing, representing a process through which designers transform the world through their own lens to give form to chaos. It involves translating the unformed into the visible, distilling sensory experiences into concrete shapes, and converting internal entropy into an existence that others can perceive and touch. I personally believe that excellent design does not forcefully impose meaning; rather, it creates a "container" capable of carrying meaning with the appropriate lightness, allowing viewers to pour their own life experiences into it.

I feel most creative in moments of total silence. When the world goes quiet, I listen to my inner voice, and it guides me on how to proceed.

I focus on the harmony between commercial function and aesthetic balance. To me, design is a collaborative discipline for solving problems, so I prioritize practical utility and effective communication.

Design is a process where rationality and sensibility intertwine. It involves emotions that demand expression while requiring disciplined restraint.

I always feel that it could be better. In my eyes, there is always room for further refinement.

I consider visual comfort first. I personally believe that the best design is like a gentle rain that moisturizes things silently, influencing the viewer without being intrusive.

Designers have a responsibility to lead and refine public aesthetics. Design should return to its essence, which is honest and effective communication. It must be clear, visually consistent, and credible, avoiding any exaggeration or false induction. By upholding professional ethics and educating the public through dialogue, designers can reshape industry habits and gradually influence the perception of beauty.

Most of my inspiration stems from daily life and serendipity. Stimulating creativity requires an enduring curiosity toward the world and a willingness to flow with the nature of things. By naturally holding onto hope and love for life, one discovers inspiration everywhere. I try to maintain a state of "relaxed and open attention," noticing the subtle shifts in my surroundings. For me, the most reliable source of creativity is "permission" to create something without a specific destination, allowing myself to follow a tiny thread of an idea even if I do not yet know where it leads.

My creative process usually begins with a sketch or a few lines in a memo, followed by rapid exploration: fragmented visual snippets, color tests, and typographic experiments. I allow the work to reveal its true face rather than forcing it into a preconceived mold. At certain stages, the work often appears chaotic and uncertain, but I have learned to trust this "messy middle" rather than intervening too early to "save" it. The final stage is subtraction. I relentlessly prune the unnecessary until every remaining detail feels indispensable. In this entire process, the most difficult part is not the "creation" itself, but deciding what must be discarded.

On my days off, I usually get up at a reasonable time and avoid checking my phone first thing. I like to start the day with some studying or work, and I usually cook all my meals myself. In the afternoon, I work on my projects, then go out for a walk in the park. Evenings are for watching a film or documentary, or reading a bit before bed.

If something can be removed without losing meaning, remove it. If something must be added to preserve clarity, add it without hesitation. The work isn't about you. The work is about what the viewer encounters when they meet it.

I enjoy working in an open and flexible environment, because it gives ideas more room to grow.

I hope to keep learning and continue exploring.

I tend to work independently. For me, working on a project alone can also be a meaningful way to think through ideas.

I am currently creating a series of interactive visual works that use code and frame by frame animation to translate emotions and everyday observations. Most of the inspiration comes from subtle and incidental moments in daily life, including images, feelings, and experiences that often go unnoticed. For me, making work is also a process of collecting and organizing. I start by gathering fragments, then gradually piece them together and transform them into different forms.

For professional inquiries and collaborations, the best way to reach me is via email at yuen97515@gmail.com. I am also active on both Instagram and Xiaohongshu (RED) under the handle K3ntiv3. I use Instagram as a visual diary for my latest 3D modeling and illustration work, while Xiaohongshu serves as a dedicated space for my visual programming experiments and real-time design process.

I have always seen design as a process of experimentation rather than a search for fixed answers. Receiving this award feels like the beginning of a new stage in the practice I have been developing over the past few years. In the future, I hope to stay open to unfamiliar systems, mediums, and ways of thinking.

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.

Illustration that deals with sensory experience and psychological interiority is often treated as personal work, something seen as expressive but not rigorous. Recognition within a juried competition like the A’ Design Award pushes back against that. It signals that conceptual illustration grounded in research and structured around an argument, not just an aesthetic, belongs in the same conversation as other forms of visual communication design. For me, the award didn’t validate the piece itself so much as the premise behind it: that translating invisible human experiences into visual systems is a legitimate design problem, not a self-indulgent exercise. If that idea gains ground in the broader industry, it opens space for more designers to treat subjective, sensory, and psychological subject matter with the same rigor and ambition they’d bring to any other brief.

There was a long stretch where the centre of the composition kept changing. I had mountains and plants filling that space, and I kept adding and removing them, never satisfied. The surrounding areas were already dense with architectural structure, and in the middle stood a solitary figure in front of a doorway. Every time I added organic elements back in, the figure disappeared into the noise. Eventually I stripped the centre down to just the figure, the door, and an added layer of staircase structure. That subtraction turned out to be the turning point. With the natural forms gone, the doorway became a real threshold, and the stairs became a path leading upward into the constructed landscape of memory surrounding it. The piece suddenly had directionality. It was no longer a scene to look at but a space to enter. That single decision, choosing emptiness over fullness at the centre, resolved the tension I’d been circling for weeks and gave the whole composition its emotional point of entry.

The process was far from linear. I began in Illustrator, sketching out the initial composition with vector forms, but the precision felt restrictive at that stage, so I moved into Procreate where the drawing could stay loose and responsive. For the architectural elements, the staircases and structural frames, I built three-dimensional models in Nomad Sculpt, which gave me spatial accuracy that flat drawing alone couldn’t provide. Those models were then imported back into Procreate as structural reference, and I painted over and around them, letting the hand-drawn layers interact with the modelled geometry. Once the colour and composition were largely resolved on the iPad, I brought everything into Photoshop for final texture work, detail refinement, and colour grading. Each tool shift changed how I saw the piece. Modelling the architecture in 3D made the spatial relationships concrete in a way that drawing hadn’t, and that ended up redirecting parts of the composition I thought were already settled. The technical process didn’t just execute the concept. It kept reshaping it, which in hindsight is consistent with the whole premise of the work: nothing is assembled once and left intact. It’s rebuilt at every stage.

Constructing The Intangible was never intended as a standalone piece. It was the first full articulation of a method I’ve continued to develop: extracting visual structure from experiences that have no inherent visible form. Since completing it, I’ve been working across a broader range of intangible subjects, memory, disappearance, love, and each one demands its own structural logic. Memory called for construction and scaffolding. Other subjects may call for entirely different spatial vocabularies. What carries over is the underlying approach: treating an invisible experience as a genuine design problem, doing the research to understand how it actually functions, and then finding a formal system that behaves the way the experience does, not one that merely illustrates it. As for the wider field, I think the intersection of memory research and visual communication is still largely unexplored. Most design work that touches psychology stays at the level of metaphor. There’s real room for practices that engage with cognitive and emotional research structurally, not decoratively, and I want my work to keep pushing in that direction.

The piece originates from the scent of pomelo blossoms, and that scent is cold. Sharp, clear, almost solitary. Yet the final palette reads as warm and luminous. That contradiction is deliberate but rarely discussed. I also think the production process deserves more attention. The work was rebuilt across multiple tools and rethought many times, sections demolished and reassembled at every stage. That process isn’t a behind-the-scenes detail. It’s the argument itself, enacted rather than depicted.

The structural coldness was never left to dominate on its own. The architectural forms are wrapped in plant life throughout the composition, and running through the centre is a river, drawn from a real detail: a small stream beneath the pomelo tree where the original scent memory is rooted. Water did a lot of the emotional work. It softened the rigidity of the built environment and introduced a sense of movement and openness that grids and staircases alone couldn’t carry. But the river also carries conceptual weight. It only flows forward. You can trace it upstream toward its source, but the water you find there is never the same water you remembered. That, for me, is one of the deepest reasons memory is reconstruction rather than retrieval. The current has already moved on. What we return to has changed simply because time has passed through it. Allowing that kind of layered, flowing element to coexist with the hard architectural framework is what kept the piece from becoming cold. The precision holds the structure. The water holds the feeling.

The most transferable lesson is probably the simplest one. The work that resonated most didn’t come from chasing trends or optimizing for efficiency. It came from stopping and looking inward. In a field that moves fast and rewards speed, the decision to sit with a personal sensory memory, something as quiet as the scent of a tree from childhood, and take it seriously as a design problem felt almost unreasonable at the time. But that’s exactly where the strength of the work came from. I think the experiences most worth translating into visual form are usually the ones that feel too small or too private to matter. They matter precisely because they’re universal at the root. Everyone has a scent that pulls them back somewhere. Everyone has a memory that rebuilds itself every time they reach for it. If you’re looking for subject matter with real weight, you probably don’t need to look further than your own interior life. The challenge is having the patience and honesty to stay there long enough to find the structure inside it.