Dive into the dewy hues of Hyohyo’s dreamy illustrations

Hyohyo never had the chance to go to art school, but that never held her back. Nothing could stop the Chinese illustrator from picking up the paintbrush and taking to the white blank page with copious amounts of softness. Though she studied an academic subject at university, she spent much of her time not buried in books, but exploring her style of illustration. It was a period of great creative (and unexpected) change for Hyohyo, and it was during this time that the delicately handed illustrator established a subdued aesthetic soaked in hues of blue.

“Most of my creative power comes from a persistent kind of sadness,” she tells It’s Nice That. “It’s very big. Like an iceberg in my heart that will never melt. Artistic creation is the only way I can interpret it.” With acute emotion at its core, languid, textural marks flow from Hyohyo in an explosion of blue shades. It’s a style that’s been influenced by Japanese animation that the young Hyohyo watched as a child. Masaaki Yuasa’s Kaiba for example helped her to find an intuitive rhythm within her compositions.

At the root of her practice lies a “constant desire to express”. It’s a strong and involuntary feeling for Hyohyo, something that cannot be ignored and makes her moods “fluctuate violently.” But by putting pencil to paper, she translates these feelings into something more physical, and her drawings become a study of such internal feelings; a way “to know the self and the heart,” she adds. On her signature drawing style, Hyohyo is drawn to depicting a similar kind of face with each illustration, where the eyes resemble the Greek letter, θ or Theta, the eighth letter in the alphabet.

It’s a reference she’s used since the beginning, a “simplification of lamb’s eyes” that denotes innocence, dewiness and even confusion. “I like this confusion very much,” adds Hyohyo. “It seems that she is looking anywhere, or nowhere at the same time. It’s an expression that can be used at any time,” a suitable neutrality for the ethereal nature of her work. When it comes to the treatment of the image, she creates a “fuzzy feeling” to match the haziness of her compositions. This can be seen in a spectrum of pencil shades in her earlier work, or more recently, a spray gun or piece of chalk which heightens this atmosphere.

Integral to her work is the Chinese phrase 软透明 meaning “soft transparency” which she hints to with each artwork. It can be seen in her use of bubbles for example, a recurring motif in Hyohyo’s dreamy illustrations. “Bubbles are perishable,” she says of their frequent significance, “they are always moving towards the end, unlike a dandelion, which is moving towards the new.” She also uses the symbol of the bubble in relation to other people too. Ascribed amidst two people for instance, Hyohyo remarks on “a kind of dreamlike contact” between the two, commenting on how the moment is fleeting and worth cherishing.

Elsewhere, trees make a recurring appearance in Hyohyo’s moody works. “I think trees are perfect creatures and ideal states, so they also often appear,” she tells us. Recently, she has used the symbol to describe her current state fo self, channeling her body into a trunk and her hair into branches and leaves. She calls it a form of “triple separation,” representing the division of different roles in her life. It’s a way of visually communicating the need to maintain certain relationships in her life at the moment; personal, work and artistic. And even though she often feels powerless, illustration has been a great way to express this. “I seldom draw sad things in an obvious sense,” she finally goes on to say. “The expression of my characters are flat, as if they are in a daze. It’s only when people look deeply, that they can find that the real message of the work is soft and fragile.”