Meet Yili Zou

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yili Zou. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yili below.

Hi Yili, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?

I learned to believe in myself from believing the people around me. If I think my sister is worth loving, then I should be worth loving too. If I think my friend should have more confidence in his work than I should too. We should be able to celebrate our successes and move on from our failures. It’s not like I can go back in time and redo it.
Of course you can’t always act rational when you’re in turmoil. But you can have confidence in simply existing. I’m still living and breathing! That’s pretty amazing!

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Recently, I’ve been busy soaking up information like a sponge. I say this with the utmost sincerity.
I go to college for illustration, and when you go to college for illustration, or anything at all, there’s that overwhelming fear of whatever you’re going to do after graduation.
I’m working hard now so I can (hopefully) have a stable income in the future. It’s not guaranteed any of my work will pay off but I’ll never know until I try. I want to be able to take care of myself and the people important to me, and I want to be able to do it with money made from my own craft. I want to afford luxuries. I want to visit my friends overseas and buy gifts for my siblings on their birthdays, and I want to keep making art as long as I live.
I want to improve at my craft! It may seem obvious but going to art school means that you’re surrounded by other artists! I think seeing the work of others makes me want to fine-tune my own work even more. And it makes me want to explore all the options available to me too. As of late, I’ve been particularly interested in sequential storytelling like comics and books, but also a lot of markets and independent selling. I’m dipping myself into a little bit of everything to see if it sticks. It’s still extremely early in my career so I have a lot ahead of me. I want to keep trying new things and see where it takes me. And probably fail at them. A lot. But then I’ll learn from those failures.

Failures are apart of the everyday. And a lot of my work focuses on the everyday.
I grew up in Brooklyn, NY so there’s a special admiration I have for city life and the people in them. I love the way buildings and balconies overlap each other as they form intricate spaces and patterns, not unlike something in a Wong Kar-wai film.
And I love the way people look. I think it’s fascinating that we’re all a little different here and there, and that every stranger on the train is someone with a full life outside of my own. I want to study their features onto a sheet of paper even if I can never fully capture their story.

One of my favorite interactions centering my art was at a tabling event I did. I had drawn a random character for a zine when a stranger was flipping through it and excitedly exclaimed it looked like their mom. It makes me incredibly happy to make art that people are able to see their lives in. I hope my art makes people feel things they’ll remember.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I went to a family wedding recently and I think if there’s one thing I took out of it, it’s that I would much rather cease to exist than to lie about my existence. I always try to be as genuine as possible, because keeping up a lie is annoying. But also because I think many of us, including myself, deserve the truth.
I think that quality of self-dedication is a pretty big part of my artistic journey. But that quality of dedication wouldn’t exist without a very profound passion for the very craft I’m dedicated to. And that passion wouldn’t exist if I wasn’t gifted with such an enriching environment around me.

If there’s any advice I have for folks aspiring to make a career of their art, it would be to surround yourself with people who will support what you want to do. It’s important to make your own connections and find your own opportunities. I owe a lot of my livelihood to luck but I also owe a lot of it to actively expressing the things I want to do and the things I’m interested in. People hear that stuff! And they think of you when they hear about it!
I don’t think art school is for everyone. And honestly I wish breaking into the industry wasn’t so competitive because I’m sure many more people would go into it otherwise. The world is extremely unfair, and I can’t speak for most people in it. But if you have the drive and the passion, I think you should find the resources. I think we should all believe in a brighter future.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

I’m more open with myself than I’ve ever been.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yilizou.weebly.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wheatormeat

Image Credits

Yili Zou