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I’m Yian Lee, a multidisciplinary artist from Taiwan, based in New York. My work moves between spiritual abstract geometry, fantasy visual storytelling, painting, and illustration. I use mystical and divinatory imagery as source material, less for its systems than for how it gives shape to inner states with no clean name. What holds it together is an ongoing interest in form, color, energy, and consciousness, and a symbolic language I've been building across projects rather than arriving at once.

In 2016 I moved to New York to study Fashion Marketing at Parsons School of Design, and started out as a fashion stylist. Work from those years appeared in Vogue Taiwan, Harper's Bazaar, Nylon Germany, ELLE Serbia, Schön, and Vanity Teen. In 2020 I held my first solo exhibition, Color Geometry, at Chinatown Soup Gallery, an early working through of the dialogue between color and form that still runs under everything I make. That same year I moved into illustration and painting as my main practice.

Over the years, I've worked with brands and creative platforms including CIRCOLOCO, PENKER, Siizu, and AVEC THY, across illustration, art direction, and styling. My work has appeared in dpi Magazine, SHOUTOUTLA, Alien Magazine, and Popshot, and has been recognized by the iJungle Illustration Awards and the Communication Arts Illustration Competition. Moving between commercial commissions and my own practice is what keeps both of them honest. Each one asks something the other doesn't, and the symbolic language I work in has grown out of that back-and-forth rather than from either side alone.

From 2022 to 2026 I worked at Yuga Labs as a Senior Artist across BAYC, Otherside, Meebits, Moonbirds, HV-MTL, Legends of the Mara, and Nexus. The work spanned character design and concept development, virtual world-building, and visual storytelling, often holding one visual direction steady across a project that kept changing shape underneath it. Four years of that taught me to read what a brand actually is, its tone, its audience, the thing it's trying to be, and to keep an image answering to that across a whole body of work rather than one piece at a time.

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Legend of the Mara - Character design/ Visual development. (2024)

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