Bio
Tianchen Gong is an illustrator, graphic designer, curator, and multimedia artist. She was born in Beijing and moved to New York to study. Her game design and curation work aim to create engaging narratives that invite the audience to interact. Her illustration work explores the application of watercolor textures combined with digital enhancement techniques. She is interested in depicting humans’ physical presence, social relations and environmental influence. She tends to explore different mediums of work including illustration, animation, children’s books, book design, AR/VR games, graphic design and public installation.
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She is currently working as a curator at A Space gallery in New York. For exhibition promotions, she utilized her skills in graphic design to manage the gallery website and create posters to access a broader audience. One of her exhibitions, 'Desire-Body Without Organs,' co-curated with another curator, was featured by LI TANG and UP MAGAZINE.
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Tianchen’s portfolio uses various formats to depict and interpret human relationships.
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Sitting Here With You is an AR Game that connects people from the present, to stories from the past, and from others. It leads players to look through plaques on Central Park benches, imagine through the words donors left on the plaques, and cooperate with other players to complete the mission. The game itself tells a story about people in a little town all contributing to a party to celebrate a happy marriage. The game utilizes figma and digital drawings by procreating to develop the game interface on phone. In addition, 3D characters are created through Blender and virtualized by Reality Composer.
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To Know Me and To Know You is a board game generated from a children’s book that encourages children to learn to socialize through parody shows. In addition to the children’s book, the game creates 3 daily scenarios and uses cards to lead kids to improvise. Through this process, kids can practice observing others and joining their play. The game is designed based on field research, and utilizes InDesign, Illustrator and digital drawings to be produced.
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My Life Goals Checklist is a collection of products designed to resonate with a broad audience and inspire connections over shared life aspirations. The series includes a Illustration book that tells how easy it could be to achieve the first step of a big life goals; a notebook design that helps users to track their progress on goals; an exhibition for people to get together and celebrate their achieved goals with an AR experience, and a social media account sharing progress and updates on developing more notebook pages. Mediums used in this project ranges from traditional watercolor, Photoshop, InDesign, Ri-So printing, Blender 3D models and Reality Composer.
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Join is a public installation that encourages viewers to observe the connections between groups and their mutual influences. It was inspired by the similarity between New York pigeons and immigrants in America. It highlights the change after contacting something new. Through this installation, people passing by Union Square are encouraged to get close to people, feel the influence from surrounding environments, and have a nice evening. The prototype making process utilized Blender and After Effect. Touch Designer and Metal Sculptures equipped with camera and projectors are proposed to be used in the real life installation.
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Tianchen received a Bachelor of Fine Art, majored in Illustration and minored in communication design from THE NEW SCHOOL, Parsons. Through her studies, her work has developed from traditional drawing to be applied in books, advertising, animations, curation and public arts. She is also in Quiddity Collective, with her works featured in their bimonthly illustration ri-so zine.
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For further development, Tianchen aims to create works that could turn tedious lives into fun experiences. Being at Parsons DT graduation exhibition every year has made her enjoy the interactive part from student works. If fashion senior show’s collections provide rich layers of textures for audiences to look around, Design Technology’s projects define an environment for the audience to feel inside the space. Tianchen aims to explore virtual and physical approaches to activate a space.