Meet Shengwei Zhou | Digital Artist & Film Maker

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

Hi Shengwei, can you talk to us a bit about the social impact of your business?
I am currently creating digital art works especially animation by utilizing natural elements and recycled materials and converting these things into my characters and settings in animation. I believe this is a good way to highlight the beauty of our nature, our blue planet and our community. Because it will inspire others to convert some so called daily waste into artistic works, installation art or stop motion animations. Also it will bring the environmental issues to the public awareness in a more artistic way.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
At the age of 19, I was determined to make a feature-length science fiction film. This seemed like an unimaginable thing at the time, because I had just entered university and hardly knew anyone in the film industry, nor did I have any portfolio. But I had an idea, a story about my mother. Even I did not expect this idea to support my creative process for more than 6 years. Finally, with my own strength, without the support of money, technology and social network from film industry, I completed this idea with a combination of stop motion animation and contemporary art. I named this feature film as SHe. Its protagonists are not the cool robots in regular science fiction movies, but a pile of daily waste. What I didn’t expect was that such a sci-fi film made from domestic garbage helped me win more than 50 awards in global film festivals, including the nomination for the best animated feature film at the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival, at the same time considered by VARIETY as “accomplished and invented as it is conceptually bizarre”.

It all starts with the story between me and my mother. When I was a child, my mother often worked hard outside. In my eyes, she played multiple roles of woman, mother, and even man at the same time. So I gradually came up with a story: In a world where men dominate everything, women are treated as fertility machines, and one of the women is dissatisfied with the lack of free will and is determined to resist. Driven by this idea, I quickly completed the script. At that time, I brought the script to many film studios, but they were turned away. They thought I was too young to handle this and had no experience. They also felt that the script required too much budget and the risk was too high. However, I couldn’t wait any longer to achieve this story because the strong desire for expression drove me to create immediately. After experiencing various frustrations in film industry, I jumped out of the film circle, looking for help in the animation and contemporary art. Finally, I found a new way to implement this script: replacing the robot characters with shoes, and replacing the patriarchal society in which the story took place with a monster world made of daily waste. SHe was born. This is the first object stop-motion animation feature film in the Chinese animation history, taking me nearly 6 years to finish it. The whole film is 95 minutes long and consists of nearly 58,000 photos. All the characters, props and settings in the film are made of household garbage such as used shoes, wasted socks, used clothes, used wine bottles, used delivery cartons and so on. The original main character, the human mother, in the script was replaced by a high-heeled mother. Under the premise that the story has not changed, the visual style of the entire film has become more like a combination of installation art and cult animation film.

Since then, I have discovered a unique path to create films: using the visual forms of digital art such as animation and new media to present the story of a genre film. When creating films in this way, I will be more free and able to create in a more flexible way. The traditional film industry system has various restrictions on individual artists: artists need to compromise with the market, the preferences of audiences, other team members, and the capital. But if I use digital art combined with animation to tell the story I want to tell, I only need a computer, a camera, and some collected materials in my living room to create a fantasy world.

In 2021, I came to the University of Southern California to further study animation and digital arts. In the first semester here, I successfully created the first episode of an original animated short film series called Perfect City. In this series, I want to tell a story about different individuals fighting against the grand illusion constructed by consumerism. In a utopian perfect city shrouded in the illusion of happiness, how can each independent individual with a rebellious spirit discover and release the energy of sadness and pain embedded deep in their heart? This is what I am curious about.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I would recommend the Santa Monica Beach. I found out that reading books along side the beach and seeing the sunset there is the most beautiful thing in LA. I would also recommend the snacks there like the grilled corn.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I really want to thank my mentor in USC, Kathy Smith, a really impressive digital artist with interdisciplinary background and artistic taste. She inspired me finding out the beauty of nature in LA. I started collecting natural elements like tree barks, leaves, burned tree skins, dry flowers around my community and my local area in LA and tried to convert them into animation amid the guidance of Kathy. Also she gave me lots of instructions on how to build up inner links between these ordinary objects and the emotional meanings behind them, which helped me cultivate my on going animation series: Perfect City.

Website: https://zhoushengwei.squarespace.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shengwei_wai/?hl=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/%E5%91%A8%E5%9C%A3%E5%B4%B4/100039033007527/

Image Credits
Shengwei Zhou Lei Wang Runqi Wang Keju Luo Meng Wu Dina Garatly Shiqi Hu