Li Zhizhen

Traveler's Notes

About Me

Meet me in two minutes — in my own words

Li Zhizhen, Class of 2027

I grew up doing two things that turned out to be one: watching insects on the ground, and learning Chinese ink painting on rice paper. Both trained me to notice small lives and unfinished space — and that habit became the lens through which I now build original characters, games, and interactive worlds.

What drives me

Curiosity and inventiveness. As a child I rarely sat still — I climbed slides and crouched down to watch insects. Those small creatures made me curious about forms of life unlike my own.

What I notice

Quiet inner states. I turned stress-driven habits — biting nails, closing a door again and again — into visual work, asking how emotion becomes visible. Observing an insect and building a game world ask me the same question: how might life take another form, and how would it behave?

What I make

Chinese painting and sketching led to original characters and interactive worlds. I founded an original-character club at school, where private ideas grow into shared stories.

Name Li Zhizhen

Affiliation Pinghe International School, Class of 2027

Target Animation / Game Design / Interactive Media / Ink Painting

Specialties Ink Painting / Digital Drawing / 2D Animation / Game Prototyping / Storyboarding

Hobbies Insect watching / Original characters / Ink and sketching / 2D animation

To admissions officers: portfolio PDFs and recommendation references are available on request.

Field Notes

My Daily

🏆 Best Oral

ICDS 2025 — Youth Innovation Session

3rd International Conference on Design Science, Shanghai. Presented "Games / Animation / Design." Awarded Best Oral — one of only two student recipients.

July 25–26, 2025Shanghai, China

Ember

Community Service

When the city paused, a small light kept moving between doors.

Pandemic Community Volunteer Service, Shanghai. During the lockdown, I joined my community as a frontline volunteer — assisting with testing, delivering supplies, and caring for the elderly. To honor the fellow volunteers who risked so much, I adapted the song "There Are So Many People in This World," writing new lyrics and set to a series of my own paintings. The short video spread widely through volunteer group chats, moving countless people who served their communities at personal risk, and was later affirmed by the Shanghai municipal government and published on its official platform.

Shanghai · 2022 Adapted song · new lyrics · paintings Published on Shanghai Municipal Platform

Trials

Game Works

After the Bell

A short-term, time-limited project completed in five days. I dream constantly, and this game came from that. You are a boarding-school student: by day a Narrator runs your routine and corrects you when you step out of line. Fall asleep at your desk and the narrator is gone — the same school becomes a dream you can kick apart, break open and walk through walls in. I designed and coded it myself in Godot 4 with GDScript. Five endings record how you answered the rules. It asks what constant routine does to imagination, and whether you obey or leave. The full prototype is playable in your browser — no install.

2026Godot 4 · GDScriptFirst-person 3D▶ Play in browser ▶ YouTube

Faceless

A narrative game built in Godot 4, combining comic-style 2D characters with low-poly 3D environments. Characters' identities and ideas emerge through dialogue, clothing, and gestures. Players see the world through a protagonist whose worldview differs from everyone around them. The story spans four acts and nineteen scenes, with exploration, dialogue, and choices tracked through branching variables. In the final act, the game breaks the fourth wall, turning players into the protagonist's inner voice, encouraging empathy toward people with different perspectives. Four endings reflect how external attitudes and individual choices shape the outcome. The full game is playable in your browser — no install.

2026Godot 4 · GDScript2D × 3D Hybrid▶ Play in browser ⬇ Download Windows version ▶ YouTube

Uninvited

A 2D pixel-art stealth RPG made at Global Game Jam by a team of six. You are an assassin sent to kill a noble who acted outside his class; the only way into the masquerade ball is another guest's identity — but the moment you put it on, its etiquette becomes handcuffs. Two endings: kill him, wear his mask, and if you don't behave like one of them, you are erased too. Team leader; game design and game art by the artist, programming by teammates. Winner, Creative Prototype Exploration Award. The full game is playable in your browser — no install.

2026Unity2D PixelStealth RPGTeam of 6 · GGJ▶ Play in browser ▶ YouTube

The Museum of Truth

A 2D top-down puzzle game built in Unity with C#. The protagonist enters an inner world inside a museum, where the truth and lies of the real world take shape, and finds her way back to reality — uncovering the truth through puzzles and conversations with NPCs. The game asks what it means for people to exist in a world. Solo-developed: game design, pixel art and programming. The full game is playable in your browser — no install.

2026Unity · C#2D PixelNarrative Puzzle▶ Play in browser ▶ YouTube

In interview, Li Zhizhen explained why she wants to make games and what she believes good design looks like — in her own words:

The cleverest design is design you don't notice — the player never feels directed, yet arrives as if they found the way themselves. It's the "invisible designer": the designer builds the stage, and the player designs their own experience.

What pulls me in is the act of making a game — and guessing how my players will act and react. That's the core reason I want to study game development.

A game is an accessible art form — very low floor, limitless ceiling. You can treat it as a time-killer or read it as a profound artwork. It has visual beauty and strong interactivity; a maker can bury Easter eggs inside to voice their own views.

"Programming is just the tool that turns ideas into reality, but design decides where the game goes and how characters grow. Only when you've thought it through can you actually build it." The world she wants to build: "a game that uses negative space instead of preaching, and exploration instead of instruction."
— Li Zhizhen, in interview

Echoes

Interactive Works

Words Fall Short

A suspended interactive installation about barriers in communication. A visitor speaks into a vintage telephone and the voice reaches another handset at random; a line projected on the floor leads them to it, blurring as they walk. Designed and curated by the artist; programming by two teammates (Ma Lingjun, Hui Qicheng). Over 800 visitors experienced the work, and the principal of Zhuqiao Primary School invited us to stage it again at their school.

2026Interactive Installation▶ YouTube

On interactive work, Li Zhizhen says she is after an "invisible guidance":

It never dictates what you must press — instead, when you need it, you simply know what to click.
— Li Zhizhen, in interview

Reels

Animation Works

Sketchbook

My Dreams, My Friends, My Original Characters

Character Design · 2019–2025

Dream universe — original character comic page

Dream universe — character portrait collection

As a child, I was often trapped in an underground labyrinth. Corridors folded into impossible angles, and shadow-like substances chased behind me. Instead of being crushed by these dreams, I picked up a pen and drew every figure and monster that appeared. Gradually, they transformed from fear into friends, stepping out from the corners of my sketchbook into an original universe of my own.

The Shadow Substances

Shapeless, drifting like ink dropped into water. They are not enemies, only emotions yet to be named. Once I outlined them on paper, they stopped chasing and began guiding.

The Geometry Hunter

Armed with a gun that fires only mathematical equations and geometric figures. In dreams, I used it to break through labyrinth walls; on paper, it became a ruler and compass, cutting chaotic dreams into understandable shapes.

The Impossible Corridor

A staircase that should descend but doesn't, a corridor folded into a wrong angle. It leads nowhere, yet teaches you to keep moving while lost.

The Breathing Plants

They look like plants, yet rise and fall as if breathing. They weave silent growth with anxious pulse, reminding me that even in the darkest dreams, life continues quietly.

The Edge-Walkers

Their bodies dissolve into the page, as if they might vanish the next second. They are my fear of being unseen, and my longing to cross beyond boundaries.

Retrieve

A two-minute 2D animation, animated in Procreate with a script I wrote myself. The last man who can make imaginary friends, willing to bring warmth back to society, carries a lantern through a city that has turned cold — and nobody looks up. The film reflects a society that values efficiency and results while human relationships grow distant, and aims to bring warmth and imagination back into human connection. Directed, storyboarded and animated by the artist.

20252D Animation · Short Film▶ YouTube

Lock

A 2D experimental animation, 3 min 14 s, made in a two-week timed Visual Arts × Music interdisciplinary project. It satirizes how exam-oriented education can limit imagination and individuality, while encouraging people to express their own creativity. The film is divided into three stages, each paired with a different musical style, following the protagonist as they bravely express creativity within a system that judges students by grades. The changing color intensity and brushwork visually suggest this transformation. Directed and animated by the artist; original score by Li Xirong and Zheng Jieming.

2025AnimationExperimental▶ YouTube

Fallin'

An animation featuring two characters from Persona 3 — Aragaki and Sanada. The art style draws on the game's visual aesthetic and its signature palette of bright blue, white and black. The story explores the complex relationship between the two characters: their longing for each other, and the silence born of reluctance or inability to express true feelings. A nostalgic, melancholic atmosphere throughout.

2025AnimationFan Art▶ YouTube

Sculpture

My Memory

Memory is not a faithful record of the past, but a material — continually reshaped by time, emotion, and experience.

Installation

Residue — Specimens of a Long Memory

Mixed-media installation · 2025

Specimen of Fading Memories — tree, full view

I want to ask what the memory of someone who has lived a very long time eventually becomes. I do not treat memory as a faithful record of the past, but as a material — continually reshaped by time, emotion, and experience.

Four materials carry the idea. Stone holds memories buried deepest in the mind. Wood, with its growth rings and natural scars, marks a life's passage and the work of ageing. Wire, endlessly bent and tangled, stands both for the links between memories and for the confusion among them. Fabric, bound to the body and the everyday, keeps what cannot be said but returns through touch, smell, and sensation.

I act on these materials — burning, exposing, soaking, entangling — until charring, corrosion, fading, deformation, and fragmentation appear. The damage is the point: it shows how memory, over time, deteriorates, mutates, and is rebuilt. The specimen jars and petri dishes are our effort to preserve and to study memory. Yet what they keep is never the past itself, only its residue after time has passed through it.

Finally, I suspend these "memory specimens" from a dead tree — the tree a symbol of time and the end of life, and the wire figure beside it, a person sunk into their own recollections. The longer we live, the more memory scatters; yet the more completely a private, subjective world is built from what remains: traces, losses, feeling. Is this fragmentation a loss — or a rewriting of the self?

Roots

My Ink Paintings

My earliest language — ink, paper, and the discipline of looking.

View all ink paintings (full page) →

Lotus and Mandarin Ducks — Lotus & Mandarin DucksXieyi · Ink & Colour · 2024

Plum Blossoms in VaseGongbi · Ink & Colour · 2020

Peonies and Butterflies — Peonies & ButterfliesInk & Colour · 2023

Birds and Blossoms — Birds & BlossomsInk & Colour · 2021

Parrot and Willow — Parrot & WillowInk & Colour · 2025

Lady Playing the QinFigure · Ink & Colour · 2024

Iris in BloomGongbi · Ink & Colour · 2024

As someone who has painted since childhood, Li Zhizhen has her own reading of "negative space":

You don't reproduce everything stroke by stroke — you capture the spirit. The picture looks unfinished, yet feels complete and balanced.
— Li Zhizhen, in interview

Beacon

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