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Drawing as Evidence, Illustration as Listening: Sharpay Chenyue Yuan and the Future of Illustration Education
Sharpay Chenyue Yuan’s work begins where many illustration practices stop: not with style, not with decoration, not even with storytelling in the conventional sense, but with evidence. Her work asks what a place remembers, what an archive hides, what a community carries, and how drawing might make visible the lives that official histories leave behind. In our conversation for Design Education Talks, what emerged was not simply the profile of an illustrator, picture book author, community practitioner and educator, but a much larger argument about the future of illustration education itself: that students must learn how to see, how to listen, how to research, how to keep unfinished work, how to think historically, and how to use drawing as a form of attention.
Sharpay is a London-based illustrator, community practitioner and educator whose practice explores the relationship between site and social history. Her official profile describes her work as combining field visiting and archival methods to develop retroactive, multi-voiced narratives, often through drawing and text, using both traditional and digital media. She studied BA Archival Science at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou before completing MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art between…
