We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anjie Shi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Anjie, appreciate you joining us today. Can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hello! I’m A.Shi, an almost-self-taught illustrator and comic artist aside from my one-year learning experience at Maryland Institute College of Art. I’m currently working in the manga and comic industry, sometimes I sell products at art festivals and publish fanart zines on comic-cons. Most of my commissions are illustrations for myths and lesbian horror stories, which rarely survive censorship.
I’m proud of my passion for narrative compositions and line works. People have a stereotype that I use a huge amount of black ink but that’s just a method to save time at work. Actually, I can be quite colorful and flexible, and I’m trying lots of different styles. I’m quite unstable now as an artist.

Anjie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, we’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I was 10. I entered a boarding school, or to say a b*tch school. People bullied me because my family wasn’t rich enough to afford bilingual education. I didn’t understand the foreign language they spoke or the courses they learned, everything was terribly difficult then. The only thing I could read successfully were comic books. When we were reading Fullmetal Alchemist, Naruto, and Dragon Ball together, we forgot all the language, hierarchy, and intellectual problems. From that moment I decided to draw professionally. And I never changed my mind.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Perhaps to finish a series of sensational works. I want people to be struck by my works, reacting with some special emotion or being reminded of their unique experiences. It’s like touching their souls, so they might remember me forever.
Actually these soul audience already come to exist. If they don’t give me feedback frequently, I’ll be too lazy to draw original works. Therefore I’m doing commissions most of the time.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I think I have to unlearn many toxic things I’ve absorbed from the exam-based education, influenced by which I always think that the harder to get is the better thing, and the more oldschool is the greater. This thinking model is really bad for developing a creative career. When I started to learn art, I bought expensive courses that weren’t closely related to my major, and I listened too much from so-called famous professors or renowned old artists. They really wasted a lot of time and energy. It was when I found their suggestions for my art were not as useful as my biology teacher friend’s suggestion did I realized I should stop blind learning.
That’s not the correct way to learn art. Aside from the shared foundation part, art has many categories and minor directions, each has its unique path of development. Authority, schools, your money, and struggles don’t necessarily help you move forward on this path.
Before hardworking, you should learn yourself and learn the difference. Sometimes you get rewards from unexpected places or make your living in a mysterious way, which nobody can tell why. So you need to be clever and brave enough.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://anjieshi.squarespace.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anjie.shi/
• Other: [email protected] [email protected]