I love painting since I was a child, and I studied painting for a long time, but I never thought I would study in art major and being a painter or artist in the future. Same like the most Chinese student, I learned biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics in my high school, and I wanted to study in nutrition or psychology major in a college. However, after I took nutrition and psychology class in the university, I find it is not what I want. I am not good at writing, reading and doing research. I am more good at graphic processing than word processing. I’m more sensitive to the images than words. Then I began to take some art classes, and I find that I like it and passion for it. Therefore, I change my major in art, but there are lots of directions in art program like fine art, video art, film, animation, and design. I had to choose a direction as my major. By taking different art classes, I found I like painting and interested in storytelling, and I want to learn more about storytelling because I think storytelling is the key although in different art directions. Therefore, I choose the illustration as my major in the undergraduate study. After four years of study, I found painting or illustration is not enough for me to tell a story. Sometimes, I got a very good story, but painting takes a long time and too complicated to finish the story. I want to find an easier, faster and direct way to tell a story, so I tried the film and video making. I can shoot, cut, and editing the videos to tell stories, but I think sometimes it is a little more realistic and limited my imagination because I have to think and create a story based on what I can get and shoot. I want to find a way that includes simple, directly and could be realistic and also abstract and good for storytelling, so I found the design. It includes all I need. Design is simple and directly shows what the story is, and it could use abstract and realistic elements. The simple and direct storytelling style is what I love most about design. I hope I could learn more knowledge about design like design principles and get practice on how to use the design way to tell a story.
