Lichee

Lichee (Jiacun Li) is an illustrator, animator based in London, who specializes in storyboarding and creative visual design practice. Storytelling has always been his truest goal, gleefully conflating visual media like comics, graphic novels, 2D animation, or stop motion that enable the viewer to tune in with his visions.

Lichee’s work often involves narratives that invoke human consciousness, personal feelings and experience. He has a great interest in constructing relationships between humans and locations in order to build a memory archive around them, to try to refresh and protect those memories. Sometimes the characters are turned into anthropomorphised animals or weird unknown species. These represent different versions of himself in real life, where the idealised and the absurd coexist. 

As an ardent traveller, Lichee often uses single characters, surreal settings, symbolic elements and limited colours to communicate emotion. Currently, he is exploring the connection between illustration, filmmaking, and photography, using a film camera as an extension of his drawing tools.

German expressionism was the subject of his research in the first year of the RCA, which deeply influenced his practice, involving the exploration of architecture, stage art, and mise-en-scène. Therefore, there are many details and metaphors in his work that are expected to be discovered by the spectator.

Lichee is interested in the flâneur in French New Wave movies. Combining his exploration of human and nature, human and location, he plays with the frame, position of view, and montage to expand the narrative possibilities in the space, and continue his cinema gaming.