Yinxue (Lucy) Zou
- AH Magazine
- 17 hours ago
- 7 min read
Language, structure, and your own name
Her work begins with structure. Architecture taught her hierarchy, relationships, entry points, and the movement of attention. In typography, she found a kind of precision that can shift perception through spacing, line breaks, and repetition alone. Collage gives her room to bring fragments from different contexts into direct contact and to hold complexity that resists being reduced to a single definition. Publications offer a format in which the work gains time, through pages, pacing, return, and re-reading. In this conversation, she speaks about How Do You Pronounce Your Name?, the experience of accent and constant self-translation, the discipline of cutting, and the way design becomes a sequence of decisions that carry emotional weight.
Please introduce yourself. What is your creative path? What drew you to typography, collage, and publishing as your foundational language?
I learned to work with systems before learning style. Years of early architecture schooling gave me a baseline language of relationship and hierarchy, proportion and circulation, before embellishment. Typography and collage became increasingly central because visual language could hold emotion and the residue of lived experience with an economy I found raw and true: translation, accent, defensiveness, being made to explain yourself over and over again, and the subtle adjustments of daily life when you migrate.
With typography, I love the tension between logic and fragility, with the rational underpinnings made visual. Shift one letter’s spacing, force a line break, repeat a word or phrase, and you create a subtle sense of restraint or force that feels incredibly precise. Collage allows me to push fragments back into dialogue with one another, rubbing material from different contexts together until a shared reality can no longer be condensed into a sentence.
Publishing was born out of works that needed room to live: notation that required rhythm, breathing space, or rereading. Artist books and zines are magical containers for me, functioning as part archive and part novella. You don’t stand far away from something you can fold up and hold close for hours at a time.
What did you borrow from architecture, and what did you let go of when you shifted to working with type, images, and collage?
Architecture instilled in me a sensitivity to structure and reading at scale. I think of compositions spatially even if they aren’t architectural: where does one enter, how does attention circulate, where does the weight fall most heavily? Even if I’m making a poster, I’ll usually thumbnail a clear backbone first, mapping how you read the type and the overall hierarchy, before introducing materials into that system.
It also made me love working within parameters. Constraints aren’t a limit to expression; they heighten decision-making. Give me a rule set and I’ll give you focused emotions. Limits can be self-imposed (how many typefaces can one image use before it’s TOO MANY TYPOFACES?), and I love building internal logic for systems, whether that’s limiting my type count, limiting my color range, or playing extensively with the grid.
One thing that changed when I moved into typography and collage was subject matter. While there are often underlying power dynamics at play within architectural work, typography opened up avenues for me to discuss more visceral experiences: translation, having an accent, pressure to explain yourself all the time, and the instability that accompanies leaving one’s home for another. I started asking myself not only if a shape or form ‘works’ but if it feels true to the situation, rather than ironing it over.
Please pick one work and describe your process, from the initial idea to the production of the final piece.
Let’s talk about "How Do You Pronounce Your Name?!". On the surface, this is a question that people often mean politely, but for me, it’s become an action loaded with the need to immediately self-translate and make decisions: how much should I explain, should I simplify my name, how much of myself do I need to give to feel easy in a social situation?
From the beginning, I treated it like a system instead of copying down a quote. I wrote out keywords: correction, word splitting, repetition, politeness, humiliation, pressure, and breathing space. How can I make someone who looks at this booklet feel the weight of this question, not just literally, but the feeling you get when someone you just met asks you how to pronounce your name? How do I make them feel this upon entering, rather than discovering it only upon closer inspection?
Next, I built out the rhythm and hierarchy through typography. Bringing the “question” forward and layering in fragments of spelling out, correcting, and pronouncing until it felt relentless. Collage became less about filling space and more about creating containers for clues my brain would pick up if these situations happened in real life, rather than against blank white walls. I wanted viewers to see the conflict visually but understand there was still complexity living within that could not be solved with one sentence.
How do you determine which text/translation/time/place fragments go into the work? What does “it feels right” mean?
I save text, translation, and time/place fragments like evidence. Bits of conversations overheard or remembered; forms, emails, street signs, pronunciation corrections, whispered again to myself. Small moments that repeat silently and exact their tiny tolls.
My sources don’t need to be dense with information to stay in my archive. They need to create pressure; holes in language, the gravitational pull of being asked to explain yourself, and then having to do it again.
Cutting is where the real decision-making comes in for me. I ask: what work does this fragment do? Is it a structure? Noise? Emotional landing pad? If subtracting it clarifies the piece, it goes. Sometimes I choose to leave space instead of filling it, because space is its own kind of information too. It communicates what can’t be said.
‘It feels right’ rarely feels like excitement. It’s quiet: a fragment lands, and suddenly the centre of gravity makes sense, and you can’t read it any other way. Or the thing rubbing up against itself finally has room to live. For me, finishing happens when the problem lands where it needs to be.
When does an idea become a poster? When does it become a publication/artist book?
Poster-making, to me, is instant storytelling for public consumption. It needs to create hierarchy and urgency in seconds, cramming a situation to the front so that seeing pre-empts thinking. When an idea can be compressed into a declarative sentence, a single sharp image, or distilled to an emotional gut punch, I’ll reach for the poster, head-on, antagonistic, in your face.
But other ideas refuse compression: nervousness, static, migration as background noise that won’t “resolve.” Those are cases where publishing becomes more communicative. Turning pages creates breathing room; time, rhythm. Repetition and re-reading become part of the architecture of the project. Books can house slower digestion, and allow the viewer to wander.
I love the intimacy of tactile publications compared with posters, too. Posters get posted up in public spaces. They yell. But a zine or book feels like you’re folding someone else into your private library. Held, carried around, slept with. I see books as tangible archives; posters are banners.
How did How Do You Pronounce Your Name? develop, and what did you learn about language/identity?
HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE YOUR NAME? grew out of a question that I get asked all the time: how do you pronounce your name? On paper, it looks like an innocuous request. But whether through frustration or impatience, often it puts you under a type of scrutiny. Your name sets you apart, and then you’re expected to translate yourself on the spot to a version that is easiest for others to say. It’s instant emotional labor. After enough repeats, it becomes less a form of communication and more a negotiation.
I wanted the visuals to express duration, too. The typographic layering and friction create a tension that you can feel as a viewer; corrections, stuttering splits, repeats, and pauses become like a program that builds infinitely, one you can’t exit. Collaging together text fragments from elsewhere disrupts the idea of the ‘personal’. What should be private suddenly has an exposed circuit board. Anyone who learned English as a second language understands this “politeness” isn’t compassion; it’s a ubiquitous micro-power imbalance in cross-cultural exchange.
Language is more than how we communicate. It stores our bodily and social histories. Your name feels like something you hide in privacy, then deploy in public over and over. I didn’t want to make that struggle into a single story about victims. I wanted to honor all of it: wanting to be understood properly. Worrying you won’t be. Getting tired of explaining. And still refusing to change your name for convenience’s sake.
How do you decide on topics for teaching, and what’s the first thing you want students to understand?
I tend to pick teaching topics from places where students get stuck the most. To a lot of people, design means “making things look nice.” But what actually separates something loud from something that punches is structure, hierarchy, and hard cuts. Poster design, collage, and zines work well because you see the decisions: how rhythm is made with type on a page, what’s left in, and what’s taken out. Participants also get to take home something physical after a day of working, which feels rewarding.
Above all else, I want participants to understand two things when they walk in the door. Thing 1: design is decision-making. What matters most? What can be subtracted? How do you lead the viewer’s eye? What emotional contract does your work make before someone even reads it? Thing 2: You already have everything you need to make a visual language. Your material library is years deep. You just think you’re not ‘there’ yet. But language, lived experience, culture, and daily collecting all offer infinite visual inspiration. You just have to let yourself dive in.
Concept to completion, I break down my process cleanly. We position the concept, establish keywords, and lay out simple hierarchy sketches. Create constraints (max type count, colors allowed, grid direction) before diving into collage. I teach how to edit based on feeling: why something lands and needs to stay, and why something hurts and needs to go. My goal with students isn’t necessarily one successful end product. It’s giving them a repeatable process. Next time they’re staring down a blank page, they’ll know how to flip chaos into structure, and life into something that reads.
In this conversation, the name sits at the centre, with all the layers it carries. Her approach lets design begin with a question, then move through precise cuts, spacing, line breaks, repetition, and pause. Small shifts in language become visible, and form holds what everyday speech often cannot.
Yinxue (Lucy) Zou
