Once Upon A Time: Identity Beyond Place
Rin Wanchen Yu
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…the once upon a time is not a past designation
but futuristic: the timelessness of the tale
and lack of geographical specificity
endow it with utopian connotations…
– Jarlath Killeen
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Working with autofictional illustration portrays the fragile and often unseen that inhabit in-between spaces. Through this artistic process, I examine how gently approaching memories can reconstruct a person’s sense of belonging. This project explores displacement, loss, nostalgia, and loneliness through the lens of my youth with experiences spent living in both China and Taiwan from 2000 to 2020. By examining the psychological complexities of inhabiting interstitial space, I question how we can imagine belonging that is borderless, fluid, and evolving.
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CloseUp
Moon, Take Me From Afar / A painting about nostalgia and the place that only exist in the memories
A Thousand Turns / A painting about transformation, evolving, and breaking through
Ambiguity and Storytelling
Coming from an animation background with a strong enthusiasm for visual storytelling, I embrace the core concept in animation, which lies in bringing drawings, puppets, or any kind of still images and materials to life. My artistic practice is highly inspired by animation aesthetics and theories to give my illusion of life.
The illustrations I create are largely drawn from experiences and memories of myself and others that I have encountered – often sourced from my diaries. In my practice, I play with composition – the placement of figures, shapes, lines, and objects in a specific order – staging, perspective, as well as color and light to accomplish an image that conveys stories and emotions without words.
Creating stories through images is like telling stories to myself. The world within the artwork provides imaginative space – where I can picture the same events occurring in the world I create, yet following different story lines. Characters in this imagined world can make different choices, leading the story toward an ending that diverges from my actual experiences. Using Australian Artist Shaun Tan‘s concept that illustration provides a safe space for people to embed their own personal traumas and historical experiences, I experimented with ambiguity in my illustration. Recreating history and memories through a lens of imagination is a way of approaching historical moments, personal narrative, and memories gently. My works serve as a vehicle to carry emotions, thoughts, untold experiences, and much more than what is shown on the paper and canvas, and what we see with our eyes alone.
The writing in this thesis is deeply rooted in the personal lived experiences, while I expect my artworks to reach a broader audience by using more universal symbols over culture-specific motifs. My artistic project operates not only as a self- healing process but also as an intersection of my voice and the external world; telling stories, for me, mediates between history, memory, and inherited silence, and fosters a stronger sense of belonging and identity.
Inspired by Victorian literature scholar Jarlath Killeen’s idea that “Once upon a time is a futurism.” I place hope in the imaginative world and future while responding to the unchangeable past through the utopia I build. I question myself as a young adult, an illustrator, an artist, and a storyteller: Could my voice go further than a personal experience, but reach a broader audience and invite voices that are veiled to engage in the discussion? Could we discover the shared experiences in the differences that seem to divide people and societies apart, and make the differences become a bridge to connect our compassion and understanding? Through this project, I allow a renewed sense of identity and belonging to emerge in the present, which conforms to a binary framework and is produced through ongoing processes of translation, ambivalence, and in-betweenness.
