Annual No.17: Gary Powell Young Illustrator Award Winner: Shuting Pan

Interview with Shuting Pan

When did your interest in art begin?

I liked drawing when I was a kid. I would draw in my diary trying to say something with just images.

Who were some of your early influences? Artists, animators, designers, writers?

Artists Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, David Hockney, Jean Dubuffet, George Grosz…They are not only my early influencers, but also inspire me now from time to time.

When did you decide that illustration was something you wanted to pursue?

During my second year at university I showed my sketchbook to one of my tutors and they encouraged me to do more illustrations. For me the visual language became stronger than the oral expression when talking about ideas.

Tell us about your winning project? What was the genesis of the idea?

I was inspired by a paragraph in the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, written by Yuval Noah Harari. There is a sentence “What if computer programmers could create an entirely new but digital mind, composed of computer code, complete with a sense of self, consciousness and memory?” These questions aroused my curiosity on how artificial intelligence or the ‘digital mind’ is going to influence our memory. On the one hand, we rely a lot on social media as a platform to share and store our memories. We share photos, videos, sharing those parts of our experience in the digital world. One the other hand, we worry about the safety of our personal information, about what we shared could be copied by something or someone who is invisible.

What was your process?

I started with more research about the brain, memory and the effect the digital world has. As for the actual drawing I was deeply influenced by a David Hockney exhibit and The Rake’s Progress etchings? The balance of lines, shapes and textures of printmaking left a deep impression and inspired my solution. Through some trial and error with hand drawing, monoprints and digital methods I arrived at something that I was pleased with relying more on a few visual effects in Photoshop for the final artwork, Memory Stalker.

After graduation what do you hope to do next?

I hope to expand on the Memory Stalker approach focusing more on various visual experiments. Along with starting my career as a freelance illustrator or visual designer.

Future goals?

Ultimately, I’d like to be an art director providing opportunities for talented illustrators.

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Illustrator Gary Powell (1962–2017) established a significant national and international reputation working on numerous projects spanning across editorial, design, advertising and multimedia. His work was selected for the Royal Mail’s Millennium Stamp Collection alongside 48 top image-makers of Great Britain that included such luminaries as David Hockney, Peter Blake, Bridget Riley, Ralph Steadman and Howard Hodgkin. His commercial clients included Hewlett Packard, Royal Mail, New Yorker magazine, Peter Gabriel Limited, Penguin, Siemans, Diet Zeit magazine, GQ, Saatchi & Saatchi to name a few. He received recognition from the D&AD, Creative Review, Design Week, Illustration Now and Amnesty International.

As an esteemed educator he was an instructor in the master of arts communication design illustration program at his alma mater Central St Martins in London for more than 20 years, and served as the head of the first year bachelor of arts illustration program at the University of Brighton for nearly 25 years. Gary had also served as an external examiner at the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art, London College of Communication, Camberwell College of Arts, among others. In recognition of his achievements Powell was made a patron of the Association of Illustrators in 1999.