Hai-Hsin Huang’s detailed and delicate illustrations present “the lightness of being”

Taiwanese illustrator Hai-Hsin Huang creates minuscule drawings of mammoth detail. Unfortunately, we’ve only seen them digitally, but the joy of zooming in on her illustrations and noticing multiple figures of different personalities means each time you look at a drawing by Hai-Hsin you’re guaranteed to find something new.

Originally from Taipei, Hai-Hsin moved to New York to study a masters at the School of Visual Arts, and has remained in the city since. Each of her drawings play and explore “the ridiculousness and fear in society, the absurdity and the loneliness,” she tells It’s Nice That. “As part of a generation marked by hedonism, people seem to know more but feel less.” Humour is present in each of the illustrators pieces, whether it be the different scenes that play out in a wedding (groups dancing one side of the room, a woman fainting on the other), or the diverse activities that take place at a gallery, trying to “highlight the lives of this easy generation, and in particular, their lightness of being”.

Despite the large size of her drawings, always using delicate monochrome pencil marks to add a simplistic texture, Hai-Hsin pinpoints “the beauty and uncanniness of single moments, the humour and tragedy that is in us, life’s grandeur as well as the fragility of humanity”.