When bacteria, bugs and alike look like happy creatures, constantly reminding us to view even miniscule lifeforms with loving admiration, Rinii Fish penetrates vibrancy via lens of psychedelia, as her story and artworks show us the fun side of active imaginations.

I’d like to begin with asking you about your early progressing years. How was life for you while growing up? Please describe your inspirations and influences.

I was born in a small village and came to the city later at the age of 5 with my parents and little brother. My life was accompanied by a lot of noise and my parents didn’t give us a very peaceful environment to grow up in, often accompanied by their quarrels and fights. For me as a young girl, the most I drew at that time was the portrait of a perfect family. This is the earliest starting point in my memory when I began to start creating.

In the early days of my creative life, I usually used black and white lines to depict the two most optimistic and pessimistic images in my mind. These two images would appear as the girl and the fishman. After I created a calm black and white world for them, another world full of color and energy gradually emerged. My life changed dramatically, I began to like to use bright colors that annoyed many people, I liked to create many creatures that were unlovable, M7 Planet appeared, and bugs began to live on this planet.

When and how did you acquire artistic understanding? How did the art came in your life?

Some of the children who live in China go through special art training to take the exams that lead to art schools. I think the lack of a solid art education before I was 18 and the anxiety brought by the so-called "training" caused a deep fear of art. Of course I didn't stop creating, I just continued to create characters that no one liked to map my ideas.

I hope to venture into understanding art and experimenting with it as an adult. I like to interact with people of different languages and different cultures, and I like to be influenced by different things. (Both good and bad)

In the community I lived in it was actually relatively closed off, and after growing up I was just a dark skinned girl from a small place, and being dark skinned was hard, because people really liked fair skinned kids during my formative years. So, in not being a popular character, I silently felt these negative influences as well as the pleasure of being alone, knowing that art was somehow something that could always be with me.

What is it about psychedelics as a concept that you like so much? How come this topics as your specific inclination?

My understanding of the concept of psychedelia also only began to be felt and understood after I became an adult.

I don't think there is a specific inclination, this is just something I have gradually felt while experiencing the world, nature, music and culture at different times. I am a 90s kid, but I used to like the visual and auditory language of the 80s with steamy colors and disco. I like the charm of "retro" that allows me to enter another dimension and escape from reality.

As an adult, when I first saw Yokoo Tadanori's books and works, I learned about the influence of the American psychedelic trends of the 60's in Asia, and the bright, wild colors that my teachers hated in my childhood became my favorite, now I love the things I didn't dare use before. I think the dominant culture trapped me in it’s box, but I finally knew how to escape.

Let's get onto your creative process. How do you navigate the overall stories?

My stories are not premeditated.

My iPad and a sketchbook are my creative tools. Whenever I think of a stylized creature or feel any random inspiration, I take a quick note.It usually starts with an image of a creature. The story is a link between creatures and other creatures. Understanding the dynamics between them the story starts to happen naturally . My creatures, at the moment, I call them "bugs". Of course there are also other ways a story evolves, like Bugs Marathon. In this series I first set the goal of the story - RUN, and then start creating each different bug player to fit into this mission.

You have included the fun side of bugs and bacterias as your prominent exploration for the artworks, why is it so?

From the very beginning, I liked to create unlikeable characters, including the girl with the weird looking fishman in the beginning, and now Bugs, which of course are not mainstream attractive. In the beginning, I wanted to bring a part of my rebelliousness into the image of the work. They were not originally creatures that could be noticed by people because they were ugly and scary in the eyes of most, and only I found them cute.

I hope to bring this part of the disturbing element and blend it into the bugs, so that the disturbing emotions can be released and thus bring about self-healing, both for me and for the audience who can be friends with these bugs.

What do you think about the consequences of an industrial and hi-tech culture that impacts mental health while equally aiding growth and development? What do you have to say of this paradox?

Perhaps it was the influence of my childhood experiences that made me admire the influence of high technology and the rapid growth of our industrial civilization. I think the influence is different for each generation, and as a child born in my time, we were just entering an era of rapid technological development in China.

For me personally, from a closed town and a somewhat feudal-minded family, having access to the Internet and the world was a very important initiation for me. In addition to drawing, computer games and blogs relieved some of the loneliness for me during my childhood.

NFT was born out of social media, and I made a lot of great artist friends through NFT art, and we created our own little community to try to create new opportunities and connections for lost little artists, and these are some of the best influences I've seen.

In the environment I live in, perhaps industrialization and high-speed technology requires quick learning and the ability to have proper cognition and not be swallowed up by the flood of information, and when art is created, perhaps it is no longer a single creation, but requires part of the energy to CATCH UP. All in all for me, I really enjoy this two-way influence.

The line between art and design is fading and both are constantly evolving. How do you view this? What would you like to say about the idea of certain designs becoming art and vice versa?

I am a designer by training and my university major was industrial design. I was once obsessed with Japanese design master Naoto Fukasawa's "without thought design", which had a certain influence on me during my career of studying design and art.

I always remember a set of beverage packaging designs JUICE SKIN designed by Mr. Fukasawa. I remember that the visual language of the packaging was very real and touching.

This is one of his works of Rousing the five senses and jolting the memory that I remember very well. I think it's a wonderful example of the combination of design and art. Just as the skin of the fruit and the juice are a collection, the skin contains the taste and texture of the fruit. So Naoto Fukasawa designed a banana-flavored milk carton, which conveys the sense of taste by overlaying an octagonal banana pattern over the typical Tetra Pak packaging. In addition, Naoto Fukasawa also designed a series of fruit drink packaging, for example, the surface of soy milk packaging looks like the texture of tofu, the surface of kiwi juice and peach juice packaging have a layer of fruit skin fuzz, strawberry juice packaging embedded with small seeds, and so on.

He evokes sensations we are not aware of in an extreme way, creating naughty and delightful designs. When the designer is truly connecting people to things, in a way, the product has become a functional artwork.

What message do you have for the people of our generation? What are you trying to support or advocate?

In my country, the younger generation in these years, because of the over-proof policy of COVID , perhaps some of them, actively or passively, have been deprived of their youth and the fantasies that belong to them.

What I am trying to say is that no matter how badly the external environment affects the individual, no matter how bad it is, it is not your fault. Please never stop chasing your dreams, maybe it will take a little time, maybe it will take years, maybe longer. When you have a choice, when you can make a decision that will change your life, take the courage to take a step and try. You deserve it.