Cherise Cheung

My project explored Immigration, the movement of people from their home country to settle in a foreign country, occurs for many reasons – economic, political, family reunification, natural disasters, or the desire to change one's surroundings.
The experience of immigration can be quite traumatic but from another perspective, can also represent an act of courage.

This is an artistic practice-led research that asks: how illustrations can be created and employed to express fantasy narratives that are inspired on my  immigration experiences.

The aim for this project was to use illustration to bring into being a story that reflects on aspects of an immigrant life. As a female designer researcher living alone in a foreign country, engaging with cultural challenges that can be overwhelming and threatening.
The illustrations create an embodied practice, where feelings and affects are negotiated through colour and patterns that are elaborated as a visual story about diaspora.
The narrative approach adopted illustrative aesthetics and a format of a fairy tale to connect to an audience of immigrant teenagers wanting to understand more about the quotidian challenges of a Chinese student undertaking a Visual Communication Design Bachelor’s degree.
The project is conducted as a practice-led research, combining the incorporated methodologies of illustration to storytelling to convey a narrative that uses autoethnography to articulate an experience that can help to create awareness about the challenges around immigration.

The project explores the use of images and colours to express emotion in different levels throughout the chapters, starting from the my  initial distress in learning in her hometown, Macau, about study overseas to slowly settling down in New Zealand.
The project contributes to understanding design processes that use visual narratives to convey stories about the human experiences. Additionally, the researcher is a designer that illustrates my experiences through an embodied methodology.