We recently connected with Eager Zhang and have shared our conversation below.
Eager, thank you so much for joining us today. Let’s jump right into something we’re really interested in hearing about from you – being the only one in the room. So many of us find ourselves as the only woman in the room, the only immigrant or the only artist in the room, etc. Can you talk to us about how you have learned to be effective and successful in situations where you are the only one in the room like you?
I used to be the only Asian person in a studying or working environment so many times. I don’t think that’s a label that always made me feel awkward. I believe as creative individual, every one of us is empowered by different identity we own, and owning a minor cultural mark by birth is not something I should avoid. A lot of my projects that I made and shared contained Chinese as a language, and how that bilingual background shaped my special way of thinking. Even though for English-speaking audience, it takes some time for people to understand as spectators, I won’t overthink that I’m making people uncomfortable or I have to apologize for it. I think my refusal of being apologetic of my cultural identity is really where I started to become unique and entrance who I really am, and get respects from people around me.
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?
Eager Zhang (b. 1997, China Mainland) is a visual artist and graphic designer. Being brought up as multi-lingual and trained with coding tools in college, she explores among the territory of reading behavior, language issues and poetry writing, and expands her practice into printmaking, editorial design, and web architecture. Her recent works were featured by CRACK Magazine, GQ Japan, Tokyo TDC, Society of Typographic Art (STA 100) and The Design Kids. She graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago as an MFA. Eager runs OmensOmens Lab for solution-based design practice, collaborating with clients and academic partners from US and multiple other countries.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Curiosity, self-teaching, and being multilingual.
My advice is to really spend some time and get to know where your gift is. I believe everybody has some gift, and when your gift lands on your career, you’ll be a happy person most of the time. Ask yourself, try many different types of things in school or different jobs and gigs at the beginning, ask people when they observe you, and try to find the answer before really settling down.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
I am always actively looking for collaborators or commissioners that has interesting projects regarding visual design, especially if you’re a non-designer, such as photographer, film maker, artist, non-profit organization worker, academic researcher, data analyzer, engineers …. who wanted to incorporate graphic design into your project and researches.
Contact Info:
- Website: eagerzhang.com
- Instagram: @eagerzliterally
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eager-zhang-3560a019a
Image Credits
All image credits belong to Eager Zhang.
