Adobe Illustrator

18x26 Poster

Design Goal: In acclimating to New York City post-grad, I struggled to feel at home. I felt isolated, untethered, and unsure. I wanted to create a wish for the future. So that I could wake up in my unfamiliar room and see something that captured everything I wanted to see and believe in this moment in time.

The saying at the bottom of the poster “塞翁失馬” captures the idea of a blessing in disguise in reference to a Chinese folktale about an old man and a horse. My mom likes to retell me a highly truncated version of this when things don’t go the way I hope. The mantra, which literally references an old man who lost his horse, doesn’t exactly match the poster, but I kind of don’t care—to me, perhaps, I am the old man and a rabbit can stand in as my horse.

I made this piece just for me, to grasp everything I wanted, right now. For me, this captures everything: new inspirations (New York has some made me imagine myself as a girl in an Aya Takano painting), a whimsical dream, and the blind trust in the idea that things have to work out simply, and inevitably, because my mom said so.

Sharp contrasts, child-like images, a pervasive blackness—these, to me, feel like what it is to enter your early twenties without a clue of what’s to come.

I wanted to create a hodge-podge poster modeled after the spirit of Aya Takano and late 19th century, early 20th century Japanese matchbox labels and illustrations.