10 Questions with Qintong Yu
Qintong Yu is a London-based visual artist and illustrator whose practice bridges digital craft and poetic storytelling. She holds an MA in Creative Computing from the University of the Arts London and a BA in Graphic Communication Design. Working primarily with Procreate and mixed digital techniques, she constructs tactile, large-format illustrations that fuse editorial sensibilities with fine-art composition. Living and working between cultures, Yu explores the psychological textures of diaspora and digital selfhood while contributing to dialogues on identity within the UK creative scene.
Qintong Yu - Portrait
ARTIST STATEMENT
Qintong Yu’s practice investigates how memory, identity and emotion are disassembled and recomposed in the digital era. She builds layered visual “psychoscapes” that combine dislocated anatomies, translucent gradients and ruptured geometries, evoking figures caught between dissolution and emergence. Each composition functions as an abstract narrative: fragmentary faces become unreliable narrators; floating organs act as mnemonic residue; colour shifts suggest unstable emotional climates. Influenced by surrealism, contemporary editorial illustration and CGI texturing, Yu employs a muted graphite-to-fluorescent palette to push tension between the corporeal and the synthetic. Her work ultimately asks how the self-survives continuous remix, whether through gendered gaze, migrant memory or algorithmic surveillance, and invites viewers to linger in that ambiguous threshold where coherence falters and new possibilities take shape.
Veil Of Becoming, Digital Illustration, 29.7 × 21 cm, 2025 © Qintong Yu
INTERVIEW
Let’s start from the basics. When did you first realise you wanted to be an artist? And how did you become the artist you are today?
I didn’t have a clear, dramatic moment when I realised I wanted to be an artist, it was more like a quiet, gradual unfolding. Growing up, I was always drawn to images rather than words. I would sketch as a way of processing thoughts I couldn’t quite articulate. Over time, visual expression became a language for me. I studied graphic design first, which gave me a sense of structure and clarity, but it never quite held all the emotional weight I wanted to express. Later, studying Creative Computing helped me bring in digital elements and abstraction, and that’s when things clicked. I could build layered, introspective worlds using both intuition and digital tools. Becoming the artist I am today has been about allowing uncertainty, learning from the in-between moments, and staying connected to that original impulse to draw something I couldn’t explain.
How has living between cultures shaped the stories you tell through your work?
Living between cultures, I often feel like I’m floating, never fully anchored, always in transit between languages, expectations, and emotional landscapes. This in-betweenness seeps into my work a lot. It shows up in the fragmented bodies, blurred faces, and layered textures. I think there’s a quiet grief and curiosity in that cultural displacement, what you lose, what you carry, and what gets transformed along the way. My images often live in that space: not belonging or explaining too much, just holding the tension between presence and absence. That’s something I try to honour.
Blurred Bloom, Digital Illustration, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2025 © Qintong Yu
You work between fine art and illustration. How do these two worlds influence each other in your practice?
To me, illustration is about clarity and communication; it wants to be understood. Fine art, on the other hand, is more about holding space for complexity and even contradiction. I like moving between the two. The visual sharpness and narrative discipline I learned from illustration help me build a strong composition, but I then use fine art as a way to break it apart, to loosen the meaning and invite the viewer to feel rather than decode. I think that friction is where my voice lives: in the overlap between storytelling and ambiguity.
What drew you to digital craft as your main medium?
Digital tools give me this beautiful paradox: control and softness. I can build intricate layers, erase without consequence, and sculpt light and texture in a way that feels painterly. But beyond technique, I’m drawn to digital because it mirrors the way identity feels in our era, fluid, constructed, sometimes pixelated, sometimes painfully clear. There’s something poetic about using digital tools to explore deeply human, emotional terrain.
Your works explore memory, identity, and emotion in the digital era, as you mention in your statement. What inspired you to focus on these themes?
A lot of it comes from personal reflection, trying to make sense of my own experiences with memory, cultural shifts, emotional processing, and the constant self-curation we go through online. I find that digital life both reveals and erases things: we overshare and under-feel, we remember through photos but forget how things felt. My work is a way to trace those emotional shadows. It’s not a solution, it’s more like mapping what’s lost and what still lingers.
Disjointed Perception, Digital Illustration, 29.7 × 21 cm, 2025 © Qintong Yu
Layers of Self, Digital Illustration, 29.7 × 21 cm, 2025 © Qintong Yu
Can you describe what you mean by “psychoscapes” and how you create them?
“Psychoscapes” are internal landscapes, emotional terrains where thought, feeling, and memory blend into one. I build them visually through layered compositions, blurred boundaries, and symbolic fragments. Instead of literal scenes, I try to create atmospheres that feel familiar but slightly off, like something you might recognise from a dream or a half-remembered moment. They’re less about place and more about a state of mind.
You also mention depicting fragmented faces and dislocated anatomies. What do these visual elements represent for you?
For me, fragmented bodies are a metaphor for fractured identity, especially in the context of diaspora, gender, and digital life. They speak to the way we’re constantly edited, reinterpreted, and seen in parts rather than as whole beings. Sometimes I show faces without eyes, or bodies with missing limbs, not as horror, but as a quiet resistance to being legible or neatly categorised. It’s a visual language for emotional dissonance and inner disassembly.
Your palette moves between muted graphite tones and bright fluorescent colours. How do you choose your colour schemes?
It’s very intuitive. I often start in grayscale to focus on form and composition, and then I layer in colour based on emotional tone. Soft pastels might speak to vulnerability or fading memory; fluorescent reds and blues create tension, dissonance, or urgency. I like using colour to build contradiction, quiet visuals with loud undertones, or serene palettes hiding something unsettling. The palette is never decorative; it always carries emotional weight.
Synthetic Emotions, Digital Illustration, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2025 © Qintong Yu
What role does technology play in shaping not just your process, but also the narratives in your work?
Technology is both my tool and my subject. I use digital media to create the work, but I also reflect on how technology shapes our emotional and social experiences. Things like filters, glitches, screen light, they’re all part of how we experience identity now. My images often feel artificial and intimate at the same time because that’s how life feels when mediated through screens. Technology becomes this soft machine that rewires our sense of self, and I try to capture that tension.
Lastly, what ideas or projects are you most excited to explore next?
I’m really drawn to the idea of emotional archives, how we store, distort, and re-experience feelings over time. I want to build a new series that feels like digital relics: fractured, luminous, soft, and haunted. Maybe also more interactive formats, installations or digital animations that shift in real time, so the viewer’s experience becomes part of the work. I’m also thinking more about the intersection of care and collapse, how we carry tenderness even in broken systems. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m excited to keep asking better questions.
Artist’s Talk
Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.
