Lily Li uses watercolour paint “like snow” to translate the illusions and struggles of immigration

Lily Li is an illustrator and artist born and raised in Beijing and now based in New York. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts with a major in illustration, Lily began to focus on editorial and picture book illustration, often using narrative to explore how “individuals are shaped by larger systems in everyday life”. In her new series of mixed-media illustrations Northbound, Lily has somehow created what feels like a picture book of cult film Lilja 4-Ever, a blue and drained watercolour world that is defined by its bleak atmosphere.

The project reflects on the limits of escape – illusions of freedom in constrained societies. “Northbound follows a young woman working in a border city restaurant once imagined as a gateway to opportunity, only to realise that what felt like an entry point is closer to a temporary permit,” says Lily. “Leaving does not dismantle what exists. It only reveals how deeply a system has already shaped the person who is leaving. Even when you walk away, the place you are escaping from does not disappear. Its logic travels with you, and every new place risks becoming another version of the same confinement.”

Lily began the illustrations with loose sketches and written notes to set the emotional tone before developing specific scenes, using colour and form to shape memory and reference, especially Lily’s own experience of moving between Beijing and New York as an immigrant with time limits and restrictions. To capture the mood, she used fibre gesso on wood, creating a texture that feels like paper but is in fact much colder, allowing pencil and watercolours to sit on the surface in a way that Lily describes as “like snow”. Not after long, the materials become a part of the storytelling rather than just technical choices – ephemeral, ghostly and deeply sad.

In the illustrations, the character’s faces are sometimes covered with scratchy, cold blocks of blue, whereas in other scenes, the entire character is curled up in a suitcase, which appears as a tight block, using the conventions of comic book narratives as an oppressive diegetic story-tool. The way some figures are thinly sketched, whereas others have full faces defined by black-and-white water colours or clothes speckled with muted colours brings the viewer closer to the story, directing focus subtly and effectively using mood as a character.

“I was influenced by independent filmmakers such as Hu Bo, Diao Yinan and the Coen brothers,” says Lily. “Their films often focus on ordinary people who are pushed to the margins of society and left to struggle quietly for survival. What stayed with me was not spectacle or dramatic rebellion, but the feeling of being abandoned by a system and still having to endure within it.” It’s evident in the work: small, restrained forms of persistence drive the struggle of the main characters, who speak not with words but actions – sometimes Lily obstructs the viewer from being able to see those inner feelings. Like Lilja 4-Ever, the story is cornered on all sides with building blocks, concrete and grey. There is no happy ending, nor moments of alleviation, but that’s what bakes the viewer into this desolate world so brilliantly.