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Illustration

Qiaochu Qin

Qiaochu Qin is an illustrator, graphic designer and visual storyteller from a multidisciplinary background. She graduated from Jiangnan University, China, BA Product Design in 2018. 

She has a passion for recording stories and devotes herself to exploring the extraordinary aspects of ordinary life. Most of her work is based on painting, and she is good at depicting the world with lines, depiction of details and the relationship of light and shadow. Currently, with great interest in dynamic illustration, she is working on the research on low dynamic animation based on static illustration, hoping to show more spatial sense and the sense of 'immersion'.

Qiaochu Qin

What do animals mean to us? We domesticate animals as pets and keep them, arrange their lives according to our will, animals became integrated into human society, at the same time, we adapted to their presence. In this process, what have animals gained and lost? And what have we gained and lost?

As an animal lover, and an owner of a cat, I am interested in what animals means to humans. In my practice, I used people and their cats as a starting point to explore the original, existing and potential relationships between animals and humans. In the past, people kept animals mostly for functional purposes, such as using cats to catch mice, using dogs to guard the house. Animals and humans, as two individuals, their lives should be parallel to each other. But in today's relationship, people tend to feed animals to satisfy their emotional needs, the autonomy of both parties has been lost. We may think that we could communicate with animals through eyes, actually we will never understand each other. We always think that the best that can be done for an animal is taking good care of them, but that's just human's thought. The freedom they enjoy in the human environment is artificial. They are becoming dependent on the life we provide for them. Animals have integrated into human life and started to live like humans, also, we have adapted to their presence and accepted everything about them.

I've heard 'I think I'm controlled by my cat.' more than once, so it seems that as we domesticate animals, animals also domesticate us. When a cat belongs to me, I also belong to the cat.

In the Cat's Eye

In the Cat's Eye is an animation based on complete illustrations, which is about the change of a cat's life to show the role transformation between a human and a cat and the loss of vitality of both animals and humans.

The story started from the reality, the cat is living with a human, and the whole story will happen in an unreal world, it can be divided into 2 parts, from the cat's perspective and human's perspective to see their losing identity, and through the eye contact between them to experience their role exchange.

Medium:

Digital

Size:

00:02:56
In Reality (Cat)
In Reality (Cat)
In Reality (Human)
In Reality (Human)
Natural Environment / Unreal (Cat)
Natural Environment / Unreal (Cat)
Natural Environment / Unreal (Human)
Natural Environment / Unreal (Human)
Artificial Environment / Unreal (Cat)
Artificial Environment / Unreal (Cat)
Artificial Environment / Unreal (Human)
Artificial Environment / Unreal (Human)
Being Watched by Humans (Cat's Perspective)
Being Watched by Humans (Cat's Perspective)
Being Watched by Cats (Human's  Perspective)
Being Watched by Cats (Human's Perspective)

Medium:

Digital

Size:

4800px * 2700px
In the Cat's Eye
Launch Project
In the Cat's Eye

In order to show the whole work more clearly, I developed a website to record some important process of making the animation, such as the background of my work, my research and some other details about I want to express. I hope not only people who keep pets can understand what I want to express, but everyone can have a new understanding about the relationship between animals and us.