This illustration was created for an exchange course project focused on representing personal identity. The concept centers around my family’s Chinese New Year reunion dinner, as food serves as a meaningful way to reflect on culture and personal connection.

The project highlights eight dishes I would cook for my parents during this traditional festival. These dishes draw inspiration from my hometown, the city I currently live in, and my boyfriend’s kitchen. Each dish is more than just a meal; it symbolizes the relationships built through shared recipes and the profound impact these people have had on me.

The food cooked represents a unique way of expressing love, while also serving as a reflection of my own memories, experiences, and sense of self. Through these dishes, a deeper understanding of identity and connection is formed.

Self-published booklet bringing together color palettes and texture effects produced in Watercolour Process.

A personal project named FULLNESS was used to record how to make myself feel satisfied physically and psychologically during this time and to try a complete composition on the canvas.

Pottery work collection by Yulong Lli

I randomly painted some watercolor pieces every weekend to relax. This process is similar to the experience of being a residency artist, which is what the name Home Residency comes from.

Typically, without responding to a commission, the brush takes over as a substitute for thought, and flowing paint preserves the immediacy of the decisive brushstrokes in a single stroke, revealing a more immediate sense of immediacy and consciousness. The flat pictorial spaces depict intimate but calming domestic vignettes, plants, objects, and ingredients that evoke collective memories.

A cover story campaign by The New York Times titled Love City captured different lovers in the streets, sharing their love stories through scenes. This inspired me to create an illustration of various couples embracing, with the shape of a heart at its core.

To me, love reflects the imperfect, complex nature of being young and human—our relationships are messy yet miraculous. I wanted to show that love, as a universal bond, ties together these intricate connections between people, offering a symbol that everyone can easily understand.

While observing couples kissing, I noticed that the shape formed by their necks resembled a heart. This led me to create an illustration with positive and negative space. Each pair of lovers is unique, much like individuals in real life. However, in their kiss, they all share the same essence—love.

RISOGRAPH Print

In Wang Xiaobo's novel The Golden Age, the protagonist uses physical intimacy as a way of withdrawing the self from its environment without banning himself from remembering some small but beautiful instincts. So I decided to celebrate hugging in the present moment.

Moment for Hug is a personal project after the epidemic. 1 chose to paint the image of a hug with bright blocks of color and clean lines, flattening the visual sensation to reduce the emotion and make the expression rational and transparent. I hope this will awaken associative memories in the mind of the moment of the hug, such as a smell, an object, or an unforgettable moment, rather than just an action.

Digital Print Poster and Handmade Booklet

This set of illustrations is one of my coursework during the undergraduate period. I tried to use illustrations as my language to express my review of a movie named Memoirs of a Geisha. The story is similar to Cinderella but with different meanings, like the pursuit of beauty or contend for their fate.

I chose red and blue as the main color to mirror the conflict between reality and fantasy in the movie. In addition, l also hope that viewers could add their image into my illustrations to engage the reflection，so l tried to simplify the character’s face.

In Yulong’s watercolor floral and ceramic works, he was deeply influenced by Robert Mapplethorpe’s floral photography. Mapplethorpe’s unique ability to capture the form and detail of flowers, especially in his high-contrast black-and-white images, highlights the delicate lines and contours of the flowers while conveying a sense of mystery and solemnity. Inspired by this style, he sought to achieve a similar precision in his own work, particularly through delicate handling of light, shadow, and texture. 

His aim is to explore the fragility and enduring beauty of flowers, creating a balance between simplicity and depth that resonates with Mapplethorpe’s powerful and intricate visual language.

This personal project reflects my fascination with pottery. I had the opportunity to merge my passion for illustration with ceramics, using clay and underglaze to create a series of pieces.

Pottery work collection by Yulong Lli

Pottery work collection by Yulong Lli

This series of illustrations is about my concern towards the influence of collecting and analyzing data for a better quality of life.

Some selection of Yulong’s silkscreen print works

Swatch Art Peace Hotel artist residency project

In this series, I magnify the theme of personal connection. While each character still shares the common visual motif of heart-shaped spaces formed around the neck, I employ multiple specific narratives to examine the boundaries of intimacy.

This exploration extends beyond human relationships. It touches on the complex bond between humans and nature, animals, and the environment, as well as more abstract connections with ideas like the future. These themes have been explored in various works of art, such as W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil, the film HER about humans falling in love with artificial intelligence, and Zheng Bo’s short film, which delves into the emotional relationships between humans and nature that challenge ethical boundaries.

RISOGRAPH Print