A Journey Along a Road That Never Existed

I began with Utagawa Hiroshige's Miyanokoshi Station (ca. 1836), a public-domain woodblock print in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I built a custom V4 Style in Recraft Studio from an interior crop, preserving its grey-green silhouettes, pale mist, blue water and spare carved lines. The six scenes follow an imaginary road through living islands, a ferry landing, a sleeping mountain, a post town, a rain bridge and a dawn lake. Rather than illustrating a known legend, the series treats invented creatures and quietly unfamiliar travelers as ordinary details in a travel record from a world that never existed.

Archive source: Utagawa Hiroshige, Miyanokoshi Station, ca. 1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, JP2500 — Public Domain. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/56923

Painted Forward

Classical inspiration. Contemporary imagination.

Painted Forward explores how the visual language of Raja Ravi Varma’s(1848-1906) paintings can inspire contemporary objects and digital experiences.

The project began with a question: how can historical artistic inspiration become more than an image placed on a product? Working from selected painting references, I developed a custom style in Recraft and explored their colour, light, drapery, ornament, and narrative detail as starting points for design.

Motion became another way to explore the references without overwhelming them. A flickering lamp, gently moving jasmine, and subtle reflections bring still images to life. The Monsoon Window places this movement inside a contemporary interior, while After the First Rain and Jasmine at Midnight connect physical album packaging with animated digital covers.

The result is not a reconstruction of historical objects or a set of direct reproductions. It is a contemporary exploration of how artistic references can shape form, surface, atmosphere, and storytelling—connecting a historical visual language with new possibilities for everyday life.