2022

Fiona Jingxin Chen

🌈Hi, I am Fiona Chen, a London-based interdisciplinary graphic designer and animator from China. I mainly work with motion design, animation, typography, and handcrafted art. One of my favourite quotes is from Shakespeare: “this above all to thine own self be true”, inspiring my aims and ambitions for my art to communicate human emotions with self-speculation, specifically on topics of surveillance between China and the West. I enjoy experimenting with various materials and methods in my art practice, spanning from traditional skills like letterpress and 2D traditional drawing techniques to contemporary treatments like digital art.

Flock 众

The project 'Flock 众' studied the theme of the spiral of silence, a theory that states that we are more likely to remain silent about our opinion, if we believe that the perceived majority opinion is different from ours. In society, sometimes we are silenced by our own choices and other times by authority. I am an introvert, and even though I spend a lot of my time thinking, I do not like voicing myself in public. Both my inability to voice myself as well as the lack of choice in voicing myself haunt me, as I realised I am just one single sheep in a flock, more often than not my opinions are not dependent on my ideas but on the 'sheeple' that together form the majority. With image metaphors and active motions of drawing and erasing, Flock 众 is an attempt to speak up about the forbidden, despite apparent fear.]

- Experiment with gifs about the spiral of silence

– Animatic video showing the timing with the soundtrack to get a sense of a finished piece

- Final animation

Le Coeur

Project ‘Le Coeur’ translates a story into simple imagery, studying moving images that examine typographic design, motion and sequence to create effective communication. This is an experimental animation that turns poetic language (the poem ‘Le Coeur’ by Van Gogh), into typographic moving images. I chose a French quote from Van Gogh that says the ‘heart of the human mind is layered, meaningful, ebbing and flowing’.

The use of a few colours and a clean, usually 2D, handcrafted aesthetic is one that I chose deliberately to deliver my work. This is where I attempt to apply rules and methods from graphic design to animation. To me, one of the functions of graphic design is fixing the delivery of complex images, to be relatable to the wider public. I find it fascinating when I try to break the rules of animation or create my own rules.