Role Reversal: Keeping Up with Pip
A picture-book world in which plant-like Applers classify, exhibit, and shop for humans — reversing the gaze to expose who gets to set the standard.
About
A label is never only a description. It is a decision about who someone is allowed to be.
Mengfan He works across illustration, 2D animation, mixed-media installation, handmade books, and participatory workshops. Each project begins with a name imposed from outside — a market label, a stereotype, a personality type, a prescribed stage of life — and then loosens its hold through material experiment, sequence, and the voices of the people it claims to describe.
She is completing an MA in Illustration at Kingston University and holds a BFA in Visual Communication Design from Chongqing Normal University.
Selected work
01 — 06
Amor Fati
A five-metre steel structure carrying hundreds of hand-painted kites — an installation about ambition, constraint, and learning to love one’s fate.
Represent One Answer
Five sculptural illustration pillars trace the prescribed lifeline across generations, bringing divination, material language, and performance together.
Archives Establishment
A hand-built concertina book that turns personality labels into a miniature exhibition — and asks the reader to look again.
Blind Date
Twelve life-size cardboard figures gather at a banquet table, each body carrying the house, car, or certificate by which a marriage partner is measured.
Chinese Dama
A shadow-puppet-inspired animation that counters familiar stereotypes of middle-aged Chinese women with humour, colour, and everyday independence.