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

Hi Zhen, let’s start by talking about what inspires you?
Everything truthful.

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 started out studying and practicing architecture, and then decided to shift my path onto my long-time passion, filmmaking. After line producing a feature live-action film, I wanted to try animating films instead and found myself really syncing with the animation process. But I didn’t think I found my voice yet, so I decided to pursue a degree in it for a try. My past three years at CalArts learning experimental animation has been a life-changing experience as I found a niche in hand-drawn animation on paper that really opened up a door for all my expressions. In a way it does feel like the things I’ve done in the past have all aligned in this medium, and I’m grateful for how I was led to arrive here. The first film I made with this method is my first-year film, “fur”, which enjoyed a lively festival run from Sundance, DOK Leipzig, to Annecy, and has won several awards such as the Grand Jury Prize in Animated Short Film Competition at Seattle International Film Festival in 2023. In my current work, I’m branching out to various other techniques such as stop motion, but my most immediate way stays in this simplest conventional method, and I look forward to making many more films in the near future.

 

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I was an architectural designer before I shifted my track onto filmmaking. The last architecture firm I worked for is called FieldOffice Architects in Yilan, Taiwan, where I worked for nearly a year back in 2015. They’ve dedicated almost all of their time to public space design with a vision that sometimes is all about building nothing. One of their signature projects is a big canopy that’s planted in a city hub just so as to preserve all the possibilities underneath it. They spent about 20 years on bringing it to fruition, withstanding political party rotations and countless halts in between. I still think about everything related to that canopy whenever I make a film.

Website: https://vimeo.com/zhenlizhen

Instagram: @nakatalii

Image Credits
all image copyrights by Zhen Li

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