Qianjia (Fiona) Lin

‘What is Your Anxiety?’ is a documentation project in which I aimed to explore the various anxieties women face in our contemporary society. I started the collection process by asking strangers for their photos, and the anxieties they shared with me opened my eyes to the varied struggles women face. It was interesting to discover that nowadays women tend to have more concern about themselves as individuals. As Polaroid photos are typically taken and displayed in a casual manner, I felt that using this medium and displaying them within a formal setting would create an atmosphere of solemnity to mirror the anxieties written on each photo.

With the theme of ‘Subculture’, I chose to focus my first book-formatted project on Chinese chess, Wei Qi. As a result of my dad’s heavy interest in Wei Qi, it is everywhere from my childhood to adult life. Year by year, its presence and player pool decrease, and this ancient game and the culture associated with it are being gradually forgotten. My intention for the book was to introduce the game in an appealing way for both eastern and western audiences. Through it, I learned about composition design for publications, along with the considerations that go into sharing and expressing a culture’s elements.

‘Drawn Into Music’ was a music zine I developed for an illustration class’ unthemed zine assignment. I have always loved music and saw this as an opportunity to try and turn these indescribable feelings I had into visual forms. I chose 8 songs and drew conceptual illustrations based on my feelings towards them, creating one or more images for each song and partnering them with the lyrics or descriptions. As a way to create a cohesive final product which implied each image’s relation to a single person’s feelings, I utilized a simple, limited color palette and drawing style across all pages.

This project, ‘A Sense of Place,’ asked me to display my feelings for a specific location into any visual format, therefore I produced an illustrated 12-page calendar representing my garden, a place dear to my heart. When I moved to my current house, the garden was a huge mess—rubbish, weeds, and dead plants everywhere—but as my family and I worked together, things started to change. We use the calendar to review, plan and look forward, and this is what I feel when I look at my garden; every bit of it reminds me of the past, the present, and the bright future.

As part of an observation project for a studio class, I was required to make a publication based on a suburb, so I created an illustration zine about Oakleigh. During the preparation stage, I went to Oakleigh a few times on weekdays and weekends, alone and with friends, to experience the suburb in all its forms. In my visits to Oakleigh, I recorded what I found unique about the suburb through photographs, sketches, sound, and videos, and turned the combination of these snippets into illustrations in an effort to portray the atmosphere of the suburb.