Victo Ngai – Illustrator
I watched Victor Ngai’s 2019 Offset talk called “Personal, Professional, work”. In this talk, Ngai talks about her artistic journey of first finding her love of drawing to becoming the artist she is now. When she was just 2, her family moved to Hong Kong which at the time was under British rule and had just come out of communist rule. She felt very much like an outsider due to her lack of knowledge of the local dialect as well as the tense atmosphere in Hong Kong at the time. She found her love of art and drawing through her lack of friends in her new environment as she used drawing to create her own friends. She found that she could create anything through art including adventures with these “friends” she had created. One example of this was when she wanted an animal and her Dad gave her a stuffed toy cat. She soon became bored of this so created her own cat with three heads and three personalities. This has fed into her work now as she still has a passion for animals and mainly focuses on cats in her work. The adventures that she created as a child also feed into her work now as when she is creating a piece she wants to communicate a story through visuals. At 18 she moved to the USA for university where she found that she could really make her hobby into a career. She saw how she naturally worked with line drawings as the process of layering upon the initial lines is naturally how her brain creates. She then started exploring with printmaking. Now most of her work is done on Photoshop with a simple colour palette of red, brown and yellows which she says is natural to her and brings her back to her roots in Hong Kong.