Step into the wonderfully weird illustration world of Inkee Wang

Inkee Wang perhaps has one of the best names for an illustrator possible. With a background studying graphic design at Central Saint Martins and latterly animation at the prestigious Royal College of Art, Inkee is now based in Shanghai, China, where she creates illustrations fizzing with weird and wonderful narratives.

Fascinated with comics and novels, “I want to have more of a narrative in my own works,” says the illustrator of her recent work. “I try not to draw one illustration, but a little story for the characters”. Each piece or series by the illustrator follows certain rules, they must include: “dark humour, sad stories, and colour visuals,” a winning combination in our books.

One of our favourite projects of Inkee’s is Empty Trash, a short comic for One App in China and a sad story about saying goodbye. The narrative of the short is kept ambiguous, and depicts a woman throwing out digital memories, suggestion she’s working through the dissolution of a relationship. One scene in particular sums up feeling trying to escape past memories, as the woman falls asleep with a pile of tissues on her left, but a bin full of memories giving her the side-eye on the right.

More recently, Inkee has been working with watercolours to add a textural representation to her characters. She is also working on improving her Cinema 4D skills, in an attempt to “write a longer story and make an animation about it,” she says. We look forward to seeing how Inkee’s illustrative rules will take shape when animated too.