Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Hazel He. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hazel, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

One of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on recently is my graduation work, Memory Place. It is an interactive virtual experience where the audience can use a MIDI controller to navigate and explore a space that feels slightly surreal—glitchy, nostalgic, and emotional.

My personal works often carry the meanings and emotions I perceive from everyday life, and this project was inspired by my complex feelings about migration. As I grew older and lived across different cultures, I realized that in my mind I often collage and merge elements from different times and spaces that evoke similar emotions. The more I encountered spaces that resonated with similar feelings, the more my memories of a specific scene became interwoven and reconstructed with other fragments—the smell of the air, the textures, the atmosphere—all blending together.
When I looked again at a photo of the community garden from my childhood, I was surprised by how different it looked from what I remembered. In my memory, the garden was no longer the clear factual image I got from the photo, it is rather a collage of fragments connected through emotions, forming a “memory space” that exists only in my mind.

Using the Unity engine, I built this inner memory space into a digital world, Memory Place. Within it, the audience can rotate, play, and push the knobs and keys of a MIDI controller to distort and collage the visual and sonic elements of the space—almost as if they were improvising and remixing the memories.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My work often explores the relationship between people, intimate spaces, and everyday scenes, using digital media. Many different topics inspire and drive my practice—such as East Asian cultural landscapes, my fascination with aliens and supernatural events, nostalgia, and even ordinary daily fragments. While my projects often start from personal feelings and experiences, I translate them through design into shared emotions, inviting the audience to feel as if they are experiencing them alongside me.

Before college, most of my creative work revolved around traditional forms like painting, illustrations, and sculpture. At that time, I was still uncertain about my artistic direction and hadn’t had the chance to explore much outside of those mediums. One of my interests was architecture. However, after being admitted to NYU—and partly because I grew up as a heavy internet kid who loved playing around with computers—I decided to give up architecture and chose interactive media major instead. During my time there, I was introduced to technologies I had never known before, such as creative coding and motion capture, and gradually developed my strong passion for interactive design and digital art.

I now provide a range of creative services across visual and interaction design, including graphic design, creative direction and 3D/motion, etc. With a broad skill set spanning from graphic design to interactive installations, I am able to adapt quickly to different types of projects and bring a cross-disciplinary perspective to developing diverse solutions.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I feel that there is still so much in this world I want to experience and feel, and I want to express those sensations through my work. I am also deeply curious about many mediums and forms of creation that I have not yet explored, and I wish I had unlimited time to experiment with them if possible. This curiosity—toward both the world and the mediums themselves—is what drives me to keep creating.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I am not a person who is good at expressing emotions through words, but I truly enjoy weaving visual elements together to convey my ideas. For me, the most rewarding moment as a creative is seeing my thoughts and feelings being appreciated by the audience through visual expression. I believe the happiest moment for any creator is when their expression is understood—and that kind of joy is truly irreplaceable.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://xinyihe.net/
• Instagram: @hazel.he01 (https://www.instagram.com/hazel.he01/)
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hazel-xinyi-he-825276321