We were lucky to catch up with Vicky Zhang recently and have shared our conversation below.
Vicky, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
I’m a girl from a South East China Coastal City, Shenzhen. I’m now pursuing an animation BFA degree at the USC School of Cinematic Art and working to be a brilliant storyteller, director, and artist.
Coming from this city that represents Chinese cultural fusion, a miniature of every community, lifestyle, and class, I was nurtured with the passion to pursue challenging, controversial, profound ideas, lifestyles, and stories. This passion led me to LA, a bigger place for people from all cultural backgrounds to mingle and exchange their views.
Growing up, I was not a talkative child. My way of communication is through paintings. I can’t remember the first time I picked up a crayon and doodled on sketch paper, but my love for art grounded since I was in kindergarten. Later, once literate, I fell in love with comics. Fantasy world, imaginative characters, break-taking storylines, those were things I grew up with. I didn’t talk a lot during my school days, said my mom, the patchy comic figures I drew on notebooks seemed to be saying everything I wanted to say.
Then came my cinephilia phase. I can’t remember when I fanatically fell in love with moving pictures, but like comics, they are just different ways of visual storytelling, aren’t they? I never intentionally pushed myself into this industry, even after years of dedication to my “valuable” spare time doing nothing but going to theaters. However, as if everything lined up, animation found me. The year of my college application, I was frustrated. Although as artsy as I put myself before, I did not come from any art-related education background. Due to outstanding academic reports, I followed along with the traditional Chinese academic education until high school. I got into the best school in my city, but once I was in this Ivy tower, surrounded by the cream of society, I knew I wanted to do something else. It is a hard time to squeeze my way out. I’m not only at war with pressures from the traditional Chinese family values, the elitism of my cohort, and the unrecognition from tutors, but even myself. It’s all rusty to remember what supports me to finally get on this track. Still, the love for pure stories, the emotions, cultures, and powers behind them, and the alchemy of composing them onto a big screen was definitely eternally pushing me.
Looking back on my art journey, the driving force of creation seems to be constant resistance. I want to use my creative way to speak for and represent myself. Now, coming to this larger platform and gaining numerous chances to freely create and tell stories, I wish to keep this enthusiasm and be able to represent those whose voices haven’t been heard.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
My earlier art focused on pure self-expression. When I first started to mimic artists like Salvador Dali and Egon Schiele, it almost felt like a glimpse of a different world. I did a lot of mixed media and installations throughout high school. You may think I am prone to the abstractive experimental style, while too bad that I’m also always a rational thinker, which forces me I spend a ton of time pondering the balance of self-expression and representing reality. I do like to make sense and meanings out of things. I involuntarily fell into the mode of doing thorough research on the topic I wanted to touch on, which gave my earlier work a quirky texture of magic realism, which I’m quite proud of.
Moving on to more story-based arts, when I got into a cinematic school, I also wanted to incorporate this style into my works. I love colorful fantasy character designs and world buildings, which always give people around me the impression of cuteness and delight. However, I never intended to build a world that allows the audience to escape from reality.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Quality wise, persistency is something I valued the most through my grows. Growing as an artist you will face different voices and opinions from outside, the key to stay in the same track and work things through when it’s not as how you imagined is to trust yourself and persist on one thing. Sometime being “dumb” with blindly trust your shorterm goal can be a smarter way for artist to grow.
I also highly valued the quality of being open-minded. Artist can face the situation of creative block. When that comes, instead of pushing yourself with your old working mood, change your mind by allowing yourself to get into other creative form or ideas can be really helpful.
Last, I think every areas of knowledge can be impactful to me as an artist. I grown up with good reading habit and curiocity of the world. The passion to pursue all kind of different knowledge is the key to my fountain of creativity.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
This is a interesting question for me because, personally, I’m the kind who prefer to work along, however, I always told people I am eagered to collaborated with others on creations. I believed for artist work in entertainment industry, you will always need to walk with others to your destination.
I like to work with who are not only professional in their own field but also have exellent problem solving and muti-tasking ability. Working in a group, we are not only dealing with single task repetitively but facing tons of uncertainty and challenge. There will be new ideas, new situations, new relations. The ability to stay calm and work different things out is something I valued the most on my partner.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.vickyzixizhang.com/
- Instagram: vickyzhangzixi
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
