We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yuanyuan Liang. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yuanyuan below.

Yuanyuan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

I am never interested in a regular job. The designer job brings me the greatest excitement. I live for it. It’s a blessing to wake up smiling cause I am doing what I love. I’ve worked very hard to get there. Lot of the time, I do not only think about myself as an artist. I consider myself more of a designer. The difference is: Artists focus more on creating what matters to their art. But designers care about the market, care about who the audiences or targets are. Care about bringing commercial value to the clients we serve. That’s what makes this job challenging and rewarding. A regular job probably won’t fulfill my goals as a creative person. Apparently, a regular job is 9am to 5pm. It seems to be a more stable life. But you won’t receive much, except for the salary. A creative job requires our mind to run for the design 24/7. As a result, we will receive not only the paycheck but also the satisfaction of creating things, applause from the audiences, and success after numerous failures. I would always choose a creative job over the regular ones.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

With 15 years of experience working in theater, film, television and commercials. As a costume designer, I have enjoyed the process of supporting directors, producers and actors in realizing their creative vision through costume design. Having worked with actors across the globe like Kelsey Grammar, Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson), Wendie Malick. I got to learn from the most talented people in the entertainment business. I’ve designed future theme park theaters for Walt Disney Imagineering. I worked with the biggest entertainment company in China, Maoyan Entertainment and Shanghai Media Group. The greatest thing of my job is I get to grow my skills with different design content, subjects and materials. I grow as my work glows. Being a costume designer and wardrobe stylist has allowed me to experiment with clothing. It’s not always about making beautiful clothes. It can be a nasty, messy or historical recreating job. It can be exhausting and overwhelming sometimes. But whenever I have little success I know I am one step closer to my bigger goals. It keeps me continually pushing forward.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

As a stage designer. I definitely live for audiences’ reaction, applause, laughter and tears. I always measure my design as an audience, director and writer. It’s my goal to meet the audience’s expectation, go beyond the director’s goals, and bring the writer’s story from text to life. Entertainment Design is an extremely competitive career. If you come to LA and talk to the people on the streets. More than half of them will tell you they are filmmakers or working in the entertainment industry. To make a recognizable career success as a theater and film designer can take years or even decades. My professor from my grad school is a Broadway show designer. He received his Tony Award in his 50s. His humbleness, kindness, creative mind and life-long learning explained his success. He’s my role model. I learned so much from him. And knowing I have to work even harder than him, until someday my design can carry me to the biggest and greatest stage.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I believe non-creatives sometimes have a hard time understanding a creative’s working process and how important failure is to a creative person. To start a creative journey takes a lot of research, building up ideas and getting rid of ideas. Sometimes a client might want the costume designer to give design ideas right the way. But the designer might want to take time to process whatever is on our mind and narrow it down to a solid workable idea before we even share it. A great design always takes many tries. Your design must be mature enough to bring the writer’s story alive, to give the audience some surprise, to ensure your actor’s safety, to satisfy your own creative design goals. Without failure and taking risks, a designer can not grow. Success almost never happened overnight. To designers, the price for success always starts with time and failures.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yuanyuanliang.com
• Other: yuanscouture@gmail.com