Hanrui Fu
Biography
Hanrui Fu is an illustrator and visual artist currently completing an MA in Illustration at The Glasgow School of Art. Working primarily with mixed media, her practice combines watercolour, oil pastel, coloured pencil and thread. Her work is deeply concerned with the human inner world, exploring emotions, desires, identity and the relationship between inner experience and outward appearance. Influenced by personal experience and traditional Chinese culture, she uses illustration as a way to visualise thoughts and feelings that are often difficult to express directly.
Artist Statement
Face and Fate, I draw inspiration from traditional Chinese physiognomy to explore six different human desires through facial features and their proportions. The scale of each work is determined by the relative proportions of these features, transforming the face into a visual system that reflects my personal understanding of desire and value.
Through mixed media and symbolic imagery, I explore whether our inner world can truly be revealed through appearance, and question whether fate is something that can be read from the face or something shaped by our own beliefs, experiences and desires.
Fate and Face
Inspired by the traditional Chinese concept of the “Seven Emotions and Six Desires” and Chinese physiognomy (Mian Xiang), my work explores the relationship between the proportions of human facial features and six forms of human desire: survival, persistence, love, expression, fame, and wealth. The philtrum, eyebrows, eyes, mouth, nasal tip, and cheekbones each correspond to one of these desires. By altering their proportions according to their personal significance, I reconstruct the face as a visual map of the inner self, questioning how desire, identity, and imagined destiny might be revealed through facial proportions.
13*13cm
For Sale: £300
11*34cm
For Sale: £400
12*21cm
For Sale: £500
20*42cm
For Sale: £600
10*19cm
For Sale: £500
5.5*11.5cm
For Sale: £200