The uncertainty and changeable features of life are most of artists’ source of inspiration. They create dynamic channels to bridge reality and imagination. However, when imagination comes up with realistic elements, the social value of the artwork is shown. Xinli Li, a visual artist, has found his unique artistic style aiming to create a more understandable and harmonious environment for the society.
What are your goals and plans for being an artist?
I graduated from Parsons School of Design this year with a degree in Illustration and a minor in Print Making. Right now, I’m working with various galleries and magazines to present my work. I’m also doing some illustration projects to meet the market demand. My design content always includes some strong forms of personal style such as tattoos, and scattered contract work. My goal is to become a professional artist. I have always been very interested in traditional media like drawing, oil painting, acrylics, and old techniques like printing. I feel like I can establish a deeper connection with this kind of method that I’m involved in. At the same time, I’m trying different new things, from simple electronic painting to 3D modeling and AI, which are something that I don’t think should be bound by the medium.
Your project Character Design Walk Cycle has won the Society of Illustration 2022 Student Scholarship Award. Can you give us more details about it?
Character Design Walk Cycle
Character Design Walk Cycle was originally drawn on paper with an ink pen, but I chose to animate it with Aftereffect through the computer. I designed a total of 7 characters in this animation. I have drawn dozens of characters, each reflecting a different feeling or a mental illness and eventually picked a few to put them together as a GIF. In the beginning I was mainly exploring what kind of emotions I wanted to show through the characters. After I had very specific feelings or heard about some emotions that could not be described in words, I incorporated those elements into a physical shape as delicate as possible.
Your work does show a strong personal style. Can you tell a bit about what you are trying to show in Eclipse of Reason 2020?
Eclipse of Reason 2020
I did this project when the global pandemic started in early 2020. I combined the traditional way of drawing with the animation that I was studying at that time. Each frame was hand-drawn with graphite and needed to be erased before moving on to the next scene, which is how I create the sense of trace. There are approximately 6-7 scenes in this animation, telling stories about how people are blaming each other for the source of the disease but neglecting that to stop the spread and save people’s lives are what matter the most. This was a reflection of how I felt about Covid19 in the first place. I was trying to depict specific scenarios to illustrate that locating whom to blame should never be considered a priority for any pandemic. What’s important is to have our own sense of precaution and not get carried away by others.
You also have some very interesting concepts in the Human-Animal Relationship Collection. Can you share the message that you’re trying to deliver in Meat Boy?
Meat Boy
The design concept of Meat Boy comes from the social thinking about the relationship between humans and animals. But I’m trying a different approach here to explore what it stands for spiritually but not just socially, because we can’t forget that the meat, we eat comes from a living life. We have to be grateful, or at least we need to be aware that it comes from a living life. In English, the word meat and the animal itself are not always the same word. For example, pig and pork are two completely different words. We subconsciously do not realize that meat and animals are actually the same thing, that meat is just a part of the animal. We just eat it and forget about it. So, in this project, I put the human head in the stomach, and then put the animal head where the human head is to show that in terms of life and soul, we are all the same.
The Death by Black Dog is a very complete and vivid project. What is the background behind the story?
Death by Black Dog
The inspiration for this project came from a book I was reading at the time. One of the short stories in the book really hit me hard, which made me remember some of my friends who had severe depression really want to end their lives. It’s true that people sometimes have some very extreme thoughts when they’re going through a hard time. I really hope I can find a way to be able to physicalize their feelings. The content in my project tells a story that my thoughts become a tree that grows out of my head instead of my body. And then I started climbing this tree without even realizing it myself. I stayed in the tree and waited for a black dog to come. The dog came over and opened his mouth under the tree to talk to me. But its mouth looked like a black hole with endless darkness. I then jumped into this black hole without any signs or any last words. That’s one of the unspeakable and unpredictable processes I’m trying to present here. You don’t know when and who is going to jump into this darkness.
