Meet Botai Wen | Visual Development/Concept Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Botai Wen and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Botai, why did you pursue a creative career?
My family is a very traditional Chinese family with simple values and outdated expectations. From elementary school to junior high school, our teachers and parents would hammer us to study hard and taught us that we could only achieve happiness in life if we got the best grades and went to the best university. So as an adolescent, I had to always try to maintain a life like my peers, afraid to express my true thoughts from fear of being treated as an outlier by the status quo.

I have loved reading comics and drawing books ever since I was a child, being deeply moved by their images and stories. Those flaunting lines and strokes on paper allowed me to live through the day-to-day monotony of academic life, and I felt a vitality I had never experienced before, curious about what kind of lives the people behind these stories had. I even envied the artists who could bravely express themselves and take control of their own lives, so I hoped that one day I could depart from the flow of mainstream life just so that I could express myself through artwork.

So I took initiative and started to learn how to draw by studying my favorite artists, and then I would experiment doing my own style as time progressed. Sometimes posting my artwork on social media and gaining some likes, which made me feel like my true self was being recognized from my own creation. In my last year of high school, I made the brave decision to pursue art as a career and as a life goal. For me being an artist means being exposed to what I love every day, and my life feels more vibrant and exciting because I had a choice in what my heart wanted.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My process of learning art was not a smooth one, I experienced many stressful moments including confusion about my future and self-doubt, but now I feel that the experience of learning art, no matter whether it is a success or a failure, is a process in which I have gradually found and insisted on my own self.

At the beginning of my interest in art, I taught myself by copying comics by going to bookstores, and the happiest thing I did every day was to share the new comics I bought with my classmates. I then slowly realized that drawing comics or illustration could become a career, so for many years I practiced drawing on my own after class because my teachers and family didn’t support me as an artist at first; they thought it was too risky.

In my last year of high school, I convinced my mom to let me train in traditional art and prepare the art exam for art school, so during my first year of art study, I left home alone and traveled halfway across China from the south all the way to the north in Beijing. I had such a fiery passion for art academics that every day I was in the classroom by eight in the morning sharp, and our evening classes ended after eleven at night. I still remember during the winter nights in Beijing, the moonlight reflected on the buildings through the white snow, the only light on the road in the silence of the night.

Even with all of my efforts that year and passing many exams to get to my dream art school, the competition was much fiercer than I had imagined. That’s when I tasted my first major failure in life; I failed entering into my dream school. I felt defeated, but the fire in me still wanted to push forward and fulfill my dreams no matter what. That’s when I moved back to attend the Department of Design at Shenzhen University, where I had the honor to study oil paintings with professors from the Repin Academic Institute of Fine Arts, and was selected to go to Russia to continue my studies. At that time, I was about twenty years old, very confused about my future and also afraid of living alone in a foreign country.

Ultimately I gave up the opportunity to go to Russia and intended to stay in Shenzhen to continue to study design. I majored in product design but I gradually found that I was more interested in animation design, so I applied for the school’s animation program and tried to learn storyboard design and animation background design on my own. When I was about to graduate from university, I began to research ArtCenter College of Design as a path to study entertainment design, and it was then that I realized that what I truly wanted was to learn visual development for animation and games. I felt the passion of that eighteen-year-old me once again, that same feeling of when I first started to learn how to draw.

I worked hard to prepare for my exams and portfolio, and finally applied to Artcenter. Coming to the U.S. to study was like a reboot of my life, because everything was new to me. Experiencing different cultures also brought me more inspiration as everyone had their own way of seeing the world. The school gave us many courses and opportunities to try different directions, such as 3D modeling, sculpting, character design, set design, costume design, and visual development.

It is because of these opportunities of trying new things that I slowly figured out what I liked and what I wanted to make a career of. For me, my learning journey has been a culmination of new experiences while not being afraid of failing, especially when figuring out my own voice and style. I think in retrospect, this was the biggest lesson, to learn to give yourself the chance to explore different things while you’re young, find something you love, and then stick with it to create your own voice.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
My best friends are also artists and we have known each other for more than 10 years. We have loved taking pictures of nature and doing plein-air paintings ever since we were in high school. The weather in LA is amazing, always sunny and there are so many gardens to see. I will bring my friends to Huntington Gardens where you can see different plants and architecture from different cultures like the Chinese garden and Japanese garden. We can sit on the grass to enjoy the breeze, do some sketches or even learn history stories from the museums.

I also would like to visit famous galleries with my friend, like the Nucleus gallery. They always invite some cool artists from all around the world. I will also bring my friend to Little Tokyo to check out the stores, like Kinokuniya which is my favorite bookstore; they have the latest manga, art books, stationary, and models from Japan. There are also a lot of good restaurants in Little Tokyo so we can try sushi and ramen after shopping!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
In the ten years that I have been studying art, I have met many artists who have had a great influence on me, and whose works or words have always influenced me as I have grown up. I am truly thankful to my family and friends for helping me in this journey.

At the beginning of my high school career, I wanted to choose art as a career which was a very different path from most of my classmates. My biology teacher did not think highly of me because of this, he thought that studying art would only make my grades worse, but my mom gave me the opportunity to try to work hard for the future that I wanted, and my friends have always been with me encouraging me to persevere.

With this strength of my family and friends’ continuous support, I was fortunate enough to enter the Department of Design at Shenzhen University, and had the opportunity to take a half-year course in oil painting and drawing with 2 professors from the Repin Academic Institute of Fine Arts. The oil painting professors were kind, and although I had no previous experience with oil painting, they were patient and meticulous in their teaching. They taught me how to bind the canvas by myself, learn different muscle structures of the human body, and even how to appreciate masterpieces, and they sincerely gave me a lot of encouragement. I learned from them the rigor of an artist and the heart of their work.

Later I applied to Artcenter’s Entertainment Design program, where everyone’s creativity and imagination ran wild! I gained a lot of inspiration and courage from the teachers and students around me, and tried many things I had never imagined before. When I first came to the U.S. in that semester, I was not used to the new environment, and I was not proficient in English. The school’s basic perspective class had a lot of specialized terminology, which was especially difficult for me to understand. The professor was very strict, requiring us to practice drawing straight lines with our bare hands, and our midterm and final assignments were to hand-draw an original vehicle design with perfect perspective.

I felt a lot of pressure and challenge every day, but thanks to the teaching assistants, they explained the knowledge to me over and over again and gave me demonstrations to make it easier to understand. Because of the help from teaching assistants, I was able to elevate my work to the next level, and my final assignment was recognized by the teacher and selected as exemplary work.

I would also like to thank my internship supervisors at Titmouse, who taught me a lot about the professional process and knowledge of the animation industry during my internship, and I also got to see a professional working environment. My coworkers also took care of me and would introduce me to some senior artists in the animation industry, and I learned some of the design process of animation film. There are many more people I would like to thank, it is these people who have helped me realize my dream that made me become what I am today step by step.

Website: https://botaiwen.myportfolio.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_botaiwen

Image Credits
Artworks by Botai Wen