Failure™ Magazine

Yiying Lu: The Failure Interview

Creator of Twitter’s Fail Whale presents her first solo exhibit.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment, Life

Tell me about your background and what led you to become a designer?
I was born in Shanghai and came to Sydney in 2002 after I finished high school. Then I did my design & media foundation year at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and afterwards did my bachelor’s degree at University of Technology Sydney, where I majored in visual communications and design. I also did exchange study in the U.K. at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London.

The reason why I became a designer…? My name is two characters in Chinese. “Yi” [pronounced “yee”] means happy, and “Ying” [pronounced “ying”] means creative. When I was little I wanted to become an astronaut, but my dream failed [laughs]. So I drew a flying whale instead of going to the moon.

Tell me about the inspiration for creating Fail Whale.
I had done a lot of traveling and studying overseas, and so I had a lot of friends—not only in my hometown, but everywhere I’d been—and whenever people would invite me to parties I’d have to say, “I’m overseas. I can’t go.”

Being that I was studying design—and very much into artists like René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux—I decided to respond with an e-card, instead of just e-mailing the words “I’m sorry, I can’t come.” So I created a visual that delivered my message, hence the idea of a huge whale being lifted by little birds flying overseas. I used myself as a metaphor. I’m the whale [laughs].

The reason it’s a whale and not an elephant or any other animal is because I was living in New South Wales. And the reason that the background is turquoise—similar to the Twitter background—is because I was born in December and turquoise happens to be my birthday color. That’s a meant to be, obviously.

Page 2 of 5 pages « First < 1 2 3 4 > Last »