Sashiko Yuen we chat to lA based illustrator sashiko Yuen about her quirky art & what inspires her.
up ideas for a more solid body of work. I’m aiming to snag a solo show somewhere and I feel like what I’ve created so far is barely tapping at the surface. I’ll be working with themes of violence, rage, eroticism, and liberty all under a candy coated exterior. It’ll be fun. What inspires you to keep creating? It’s a compulsion to interact, meditate on, and explore things I’m thinking about or inspired by. I constantly feed my mind with books, film, conversations, music, and colors. Creating something with your own hands is also a very satisfying feeling. Are there any mediums you’d like to explore but haven’t? Originally I didn’t see myself as an artist, although I was drawing all the time. I wanted to be a fashion designer, but through some issues I wound up studying art instead. I still constantly design outfits in my head but now I like to interject them into my art. I’d love to explore fashion, creating textiles with my own illustrations on them. Perhaps when I get the time and funding for it. Do you have any specific messages or ideas you’d like to convey through your work? There’s nobody better to be but yourself and it’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. Don’t let anybody lead you to believe differently. Do you have any fabulous dreams you’d like to see come true? The biggest part of my dream is just to be drawing and painting everyday. Which I’m mostly doing already. Now I’d just like to be able spend more hours each day doing personal work, working towards gallery shows or selfdriven illustration projects. I’d love to be able travel at least twice a year, somewhere far. And like I said before, I’d like to be more involved with fashion. If Betsey Johnson, Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs or Spank! contacted me to do art for them, I’d be beyond ecstatic!
Tell us a little about yourself. I’m a girl in her early twenties who loves fashion, sub-culture, horror, travel, tea drinking, and smelling books. Oh, and I’ve had a life-long love affair with art. What do you do and why do you do it? I’d imagine I’m some sort of babe machine. I create images of girls as a visual expression of whatever I’m going through at that point in life. They’re symbols and metaphors for more complex thoughts and feelings. It’s also as simple as seeing something I want and can’t have. So naturally I’ll imagine what kind of girl has it. Kind of a collection of my interests and desires. I start to imagine these dames as girls I’d be friends with, having adventures or sitting down for afternoon tea. It’s a comforting impulse to create and share them. What does “art” mean to you? As a kid I grew up in a military family, moving around pretty often. I was an outsider, so creating art became the only consistent thing in life. Now it’s a means to express something that transcends words and a way to connect to others. What are you working on at the moment? Lately I’ve been pretty busy working on doing a lot of unconventional portraits. Turning people into 1950s princesses or 1970s punk rock queens. Underneath all of that I’ve been creating art for group shows. One of them is a pizza themed art show at the Pony Club gallery that I’m pretty stoked about! Even further beyond that I’ve been slowly building Check out more of Sashiko’s work at www.wishcandy.net