Jingchuan Luo

Jingchuan Luo is a storyteller who combines illustration with other disciplines from anthropology and sociology to literature, film and history. This helps her to form a hybrid illustration practice conveying and shaping knowledge and narrative in experimental and compelling ways. Jingchuan has a landscape architecture background, which shapes her understanding of spaces and her interest in understanding and depicting the building environment.

Her practice mainly includes but is not limited to editorial illustration, children’s book and comics/graphic novel. Her comic work 'Men without Dream' has been included in the 6th 'Sanmao Cup' Chinese Comics Exhibition 2020.

During her 2 year RCA journey, Jingchuan Luo has delved deep into people’s mundane, extraordinary lives, working with these human stories to read, understand and illustrate a specific site.

The abrupt change of landscape - closed restaurants, vacant public spaces, people with masks - caused by the pandemic inspired her to rethink human relationships with places. Have humans always been in the process of losing their attachment to place? Is Covid-19 just an accelerator?

To raise and answer the question, she situated her final project in a deserted, old fish restaurant street based in a small district in southwestern China, and created a semi-fictional story collection THERE, showing the process of small businesses and personal community-focused restaurants getting pushed out by the pace of modern society.

Intro - The Changing Landscape

Launch Project

THERE — A site for collective narrative. 5 categories with 10 stories - how do you interpret the texts at first glance? Click in and check it out.

THERE is

A world in flux;

A combination of fact and fiction, physical and virtual;

A collective narrative by the owner of the fish restaurant, diners, truck drivers, children, delivery riders and other people;

A game of exploration requiring meticulous eyes;

An experiment of visual communication;

Beginning with an anthropological research process, and wrapped up in comic form to reconstruct a site’s history by excavating its human stories;

Developing and playing with the newspaper format to question and reflect on changing landscapes and lives.

THERE is here.

Medium:

Watercolor drawing

Newspaper format

Launch Project

Newspaper online

Newspapers have always been the media for collective narrative. Every issue is a collection of different voices. In my project THERE, I make use of this trait to elicit something beyond traditional narrative and conduct a chorus of a site's rise and fall.

No story is separate in this collection;

No one stands alone on this land.

Medium:

Newspaper

Size:

350mm x 500mm

Collective narrative Creative writing Editorial Illustration Fiction Graphic Design Graphic Novel Illustration Newspaper Poems Site writing Writing

Jingchuan Luo

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About

Royal College of Art