Reflect + Present
My Chinese name is 鄢雨佳 (Yujia Yan), I usually go by Spencer. I was born and raised in two cities of China, Changsha, and Beijing, one is in the south, and one is in the north.
First, I want to talk about NAME. Names in China usually contain parents’ wishes for their children, and people believe that names can actually affect the vision of a child’s future life. The second character in my name means rain, and that’s because it was raining when I was born; The third character stands for “good,” “fine,” and “beautiful,” which is clearly a wish from my parents.
A little about how I get on the path of becoming a graphic designer, I randomly received a pamphlet of a drawing studio specializing in art-school-entrance-exam training, the seed for art buried deep down in my heart started to sprout finally at that very second. So I have been through the training lasted for almost a year and got offers from 7 schools, and I eventually got into the Communication University of China studying Communication Design.
For the last year of college, I went to the New York Institute of Technology, which is an eye-opening opportunity. I got to visit all the museums and galleries to see those phenomenal works.
The works that I’ve done pre-graduate are mostly simply trying to meet the requirement, and there’s a lack of self-directed thinking. But it also introduced me to different methodology and ways to approach, like rotoscoping, animation, and 3d modeling. This really helps me to know the possibilities and lay a foundation for future study.
The proudest piece from pre-graduate is the tattoo stickers that I did when I was at the Cabinet Studio; this project let me create a project from scratch. The satisfaction of seeing it on the shelf in a store is indescribable.
In the last semester, I feel like I started to think in general, thinking about what I need to say and what I need to do to raise the question and make it mine. Different questions pop out of my head every day, and the way professors giving prompt really provided me a place to create.
