Meet Yexin Chai | Art Director/Concept Artist

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

Hi Yexin, what habits do you feel helped you succeed?
Consistent Artistic Practice: I’m always painting and sketching, drawing inspiration from the great masters of Academic art and the Renaissance. Their sketches hold hidden gems that you only discover by putting a brush on canvas.

Visual Inspiration from Film: Watching more good films and animations. I’m an avid consumer of quality movies and animations. I screenshot moments that inspire me, creating a visual library that sparks creativity in my work. This collection has helped me throughout my art career.

Organized Image Collection: I save and categorize impactful images based on color, composition, and more. This curated collection serves as a well of ideas for my own creations.

Cultural Enrichment: I immerse myself in art history, literature, and music. Read more books and learn more knowledge. This deepens the meaning of my work, preventing it from becoming predictable or mundane.

Networking for Fresh Perspectives: Regular interactions with diverse individuals provide a constant flow of new ideas and perspectives, fueling innovation in my art. Because there are too many talented people in the world.

Real-world Exploration through Photography: Going beyond the digital, I engage with the world through photography. This firsthand experience captures the true beauty that often eludes us online. The true world is far more different from the internet, especially for an artist.

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.
I don’t think I’m inherently different from some people who are in the arts profession and want to be recognized and be different. What makes me different from people may be that my experience of moving from traditional painting to stage comedy art and then to 3D animation, all of this art knowledge goes hand in hand, and I ended up in the field of 3D animation where I clearly feel that I have an advantage in the art field. But it’s also inseparable from the habits I mentioned earlier in these phases of my life, keeping up these good habits and learning non-stop. My long hours of study and accumulation have given me an innate strength in conceptual design and visual expression, resulting in a very clear mindset and purposefulness in pursuing my career as an art director. In addition, I know both stage art and 3D animation, so in the production of Unreal Engine animation, even though it was the first time I tried it with my teammates, my experience in these different fields allowed us to solve problems very efficiently. In my newly directed animation, I tried to tone down the image to be more vintage, like an 18th century Romantic painting. We also spent a lot of time doing a lot of research in the pre-conceptualization. In order to make the characters in our animation look more visceral and full of culture, we will also introduce different styles and cultures in our subsequent animation works,

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?
I prefer nature and would probably take a friend for a drive through the Rocky Mountains, visit some of the western movie locations, and look for cultural heritage, such as museums, monuments, old buildings, and statues that are at the heart of the city’s culture.

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 have a lot of people I look up to, and I have several mentors in my life who have helped me a lot on my artistic journey. Miss Li made me train hard in the basics of academic sketching and light and shadow in my childhood. Her strictness and excellence made me very delicate and quite strict to myself. That was the start of my art career, and I had a perfectionist idea. Then I met Mr. Yang, who was the person who changed my life values the most. He was a teacher who made me smarter and less stupid. He showed me how to learn and how to make myself valuable and helped me improve my aesthetic. He was also my art history initiation, telling me how to read a painting and how to study the meaning behind it. The basic framework of my art career was slowly formed in my interactions with him.

In my memory at the China Academy of Art, my tutor called Yumo. He is a quite powerful and interesting person, I can see he has been through a lot of stuff and there is hidden power inside his heart. Very cultured and understated. After I met him, I became more modest and started to think about myself, he made me start to focus on the true meaning of myself, my origin. I began to learn the forgotten traditions and culture in my body, in my family, and even in my nation. He made me more proud of the culture in my nation, Let me sink my teeth into the beauty of this culture. He’s made me less fickle and more calm.

Then I met conceptual artist Huang Fan, who opened up new ideas for me in conceptual design and subverted my traditional workflow. He let me understand the commercial and art combination. Forming and good habit, keeping high efficiency, making the workflow tidy and clean, and fast are the essence I absorb from him.

Website: https://chviovs.net/

Instagram: yehhsin1911

Other: https://www.artstation.com/woodmother

Image Credits
Yexin Chai