Meet Lily Li | Illustrator & Graphic Artist

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

Hi Lily, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
I pursued an artistic career because it became the most honest way for me to process and respond to the world I grew up in. As a Korean-Chinese person raised in Beijing, I was exposed early on to subtle and overt forms of systemic discrimination. I started with literature, but over time, I found that drawing allowed me to express what words sometimes couldn’t—complex emotions, internalized rage, and the contradictions of living within political and social structures that often silence dissent.
The COVID-19 years were especially formative for me. They exposed how deeply political power can intrude into private life, the body, and the emotional realm. Art became not just a form of expression, but a form of resistance. I turned to illustration, comics, and visual narratives as tools for witnessing, documenting, and challenging injustice.
To me, pursuing a creative career isn’t just about aesthetics or technique. It’s about creating space for uncomfortable truths, making grief visible, and reimagining how stories can be told. That is what keeps me in this work.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My art is rooted in storytelling—especially in the emotional and political weight of lived experience. I work across illustration, comics, and visual narratives, often using traditional materials like watercolor, colored pencil, and rice paper layered over gessoed wood panels. What sets my work apart is its commitment to emotional honesty: I use visual language to process personal rage, grief, and identity, while also documenting broader systems of violence and control.
I’m most proud of my recent project, Northbound, an illustrated book that explores forced displacement, migration policy, and the myth of freedom. It’s not just a visual experiment—it’s the emotional sum of everything I’ve carried as a Korean-Chinese artist growing up in Beijing and later moving to New York. The project weaves together every material, technique, and narrative instinct I’ve developed, but more importantly, it taught me how to be emotionally accountable to the stories I choose to tell.
Getting here wasn’t easy. I didn’t grow up with examples of what a creative life might look like—especially not one rooted in critique, resistance, and political emotion. During the COVID-19 years, I was overwhelmed by anger, isolation, and grief. But those emotions also clarified something essential for me: expression is not optional—it’s necessary. That realization is what ultimately led me to illustration. I learned how to channel those feelings into something visual, something that could move beyond the personal and speak to others in a language they might understand, even if their lives looked nothing like mine.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that good expression is never just self-serving. If it only exists to satisfy the artist emotionally, it risks becoming a form of intellectual or emotional masturbation. There’s power in stepping back, in surrendering some control over the narrative, and questioning the value of the subject itself from a more distanced, even skeptical, third-person perspective.
If there’s one thing I hope people take away from my work, it’s this: art is not an escape from reality—it’s a deeper confrontation with it. I’m not interested in smoothing things over. I want to hold space for contradiction, for anger, for grief, and for the dignity of not having all the answers.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
If my best friend came to visit, I’d plan a week that’s full of movement, laughter, and childlike joy—because for me, travel is not about luxury, it’s about play and presence. I’ve always had a soft spot for interactive outdoor activities. We would definitely go rowing on a lake, play beach volleyball, and fly kites—because I still believe that no trip is complete without something a little silly, a little physical, and a little spontaneous. These are the moments that make you feel alive.
When it comes to food, I’d avoid any overly fancy or pretentious restaurants. They go against my ideology—those kinds of “experiences” often feel hollow and performative. Instead, I’d take my friend to places that serve really good food in relaxed settings: local specialties that speak to the culture of the place, small bistros where you can drink wine and talk for hours, and street food that surprises you with its simplicity and soul.
I’d also make sure to include some famous local landmarks—not for the sake of checking them off a list, but because they’re often historically or emotionally charged spaces that tell you something about where you are. And of course, we’d spend time walking through cultural neighborhoods, food streets, or local markets—places where the everyday rhythms of a place come alive.
To me, a perfect trip isn’t about status or spectacle—it’s about curiosity, shared joy, and noticing the world together in a way that feels genuine. That’s how I try to live, and that’s definitely how I’d want to share time with someone I love.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I want to thank Doug Salati, my senior thesis professor, for supporting me throughout the process of creating Northbound—a project that represents not only the culmination of everything I learned in college, but also an experiment in form, technique, and honesty. His guidance gave me the confidence to take risks and push my visual language further than I ever had before.
I’m also deeply grateful to my close friends in college—for always being open to communication, for holding space for my anger, my confusion, and my hope. They made it possible for me to keep working when I wanted to give up.
I owe so much to my Chinese language teachers from middle and high school. They were among the first people who truly took my writing seriously and encouraged me to keep telling stories—long before I had the confidence or clarity to imagine doing this as a career. Their quiet generosity gave me permission to imagine, to question, and to write honestly.
Finally, I want to recognize the broader community of artists and writers—both living and long gone—whose work made me feel less alone. Reading Pai Hsien-yung’s short stories, for instance, taught me that art can hold grief, displacement, and identity crisis without needing to resolve them. That permission—to sit in complexity—changed everything for me.

Website: https://li3lilyli.com

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