About me

• Tell me about you and your work/art!

I’m Rui Zhang, but I always go with my English name Amber.

I like art, but in many ways and from many perspectives. I believe, art is connected. It can be displayed in many forms, through many ways. To me, music, drawing and filmmaking are all different kinds of art forms. In my art pieces, I have always wanted to use different medias to express my ideas. I didn’t really get into drawing until my senior year. I found myself having passion and talent in it. I have done a lot of illustration and portraits. I also did a series about the inspiration I get from Picasso. One of my favorite experience was using my Wacom tablet to draw in Photoshop. It was very hard at the beginning, but it just got more and more interesting as I kept exploring it. I was really surprised of how much I could draw and How detailed I could get using my computer. I’m in the undeclared major under Parsons. Part of the reason for that is I still want to explore different medias and use it later in my art creation.

• Where are you from? Is this your first timein NYC?

I’m from Guangzhou, China. It’s a really big city just like New York. It has a lot of great delicious food and its special cuisine dim-sum that is really famous all around the world.

I have been in New York city for three times. My first time was when I was 10 years old, and I came here with my family. My second time was NYU summer school experience. I took one of the drawing session in NYU, and that helped me discover my strong passion for making art. Also because of this experience of New York, it made me bump into the University Center of The New School. I was so in love with the design of the building and had a connection with it. There, I knew, that was the school I wanted.

• What kind of work do you make? If you have images of past work put them in the post.

I tried to make all kinds of work using different medias. I drew a lot of quick sketches and drawings of human body in different poses just to study it. I really like to draw people and their different facial expressions.

 

The most challenging thing was using Photoshop to draw. But eventually, when I got used to this new media, I had fun with it.

I also did a lot of still life drawings.

I was really into filmmaking also, so I made a lot of music videos during my high school years and was running the official Youtube channel of our high school, which we updated weekly news on. 

 

• What do you want to gain from this course from Parsons? 

In this course, I want to further expand my views on using different ways to approach an artwork(videos, sculpture, painting, clothes and even furniture). I’m so excited about the Making Center, because there I will have my first sewing experience. I also have strong curiosity about fashion design and hopefully after this year I will be able to make my own clothes t00.

• What do you want to do when you graduate?

I still don’t know what I want to do in the future, but for sure it’s something about art. I wish the first year in Parsons will  help me further define myself as an artist and find my own color and style in art and design.