VSCO Artist Initiative recipient Leon Yan, a multimedia artist and filmmaker, has been hard at work creating large-format posters inspired by music and storytelling. His goal with the project is to visually interpret the narrative of specific songs in an illustrative medium. Giving us an update on his poster series, Leon explains the complexities of sharing these stories in a two-dimensional form and shares pieces of his works in progress.
“For me, music is a deeply mysterious and seductive form of expression,” Leon shares. “It’s highly atmospheric, shape-shifting, and abstract.” To harness that expression and compress it into a poster has been a process of discovery for Leon. “Rather than make a music video, I wanted to do something a bit different and show specific tracks of music in a highly illustrative and visually expressive print form.” For this series of posters, Leon is listening to post-rock, IDM, experimental avant-garde, and Japanese psychedelic rock, such as Acid Mothers Temple, Boris, Windy & Carl, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and Autechre.
In art school, Leon experimented with collage, illustration, and photography. He’s always kept these creative formats in the back of his mind, and when he embarked on his Artist Initiative project, he drew upon that background for inspiration. He scouted and shot locations around China such as Huangshan, the Zhangye Danxia Landforms in Gansu, the Cuandixia folk village in Mentougou, Mount Tai, and other landscapes. “I’m using elements from these photos to form the bases of the final compositions,” he shares, “from which I can build something more complex, psychedelic, and interesting.”
Though Leon has inspiration to draw from, he still meets challenges when it comes to determining what exactly he sees when he listens to a song. “How would I show this final expression of the music all in a single frame?” he asks. Presenting a song — which is written in a time-based medium — as a single thought is no easy feat. “I have been investigating ways to portray narratives through the placement of elements, playing with foreground and background, and experimenting with scale.”
Stay tuned in the months to come to see Leon’s completed project. His ultimate goal is to complete these highly detailed mixed-media posters in a fashion that accurately communicates the music he’s drawing from. “Hopefully there will be a special musical quality and hints of some narratives in the posters that people will be able to see.”
