Feng Yitong illustrates the surreality of living between cities

Feng Yitong is part of It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch 2025 – a curated list of next generation creative talent from across the globe. Discover all 65 creatives in our directory, here.

Feng Yitong is an Berlin-based illustrator from Xi’an, China whose comic and hand-drawn imagery addresses migration, cultural shifts and embodied experiences in heavy, tactile forms of oil pastels. Using skills learned from her bachelors and masters degrees in illustration at the Berlin University of the Arts, she sketches her emotive scenes, then scans before using a light table to transfer them onto A4 and A3 paper. Coloured with oil pastels, she achieves her sharp visual effects by using kitchen cloths to remove or mix thick marks to create defined edges and distinct segments of her dense images.

Exploring how we are shaped by shifts in language, rituals and architecture, her current project is a graphic novel about living between Xi’an and Berlin, navigating two homes through the common imagery of everyday life and scenes from dreams. “I’m drawn to these tiny, real fragments because they shape my life,” says Feng. “Drawing them feels like keeping a diary, but also like transforming the everyday into something dream-like on paper.” There’s a constant play between texts and media, with diary pages and emails making appearances alongside vivid cityscapes, skies and flowers – all things that day-dreamers get lost in.

Feng attempts to stay clear from being inspired by other artists in order to preserve her own vision, she comments: “as a creative individual, it’s sometimes rather sad to be influenced by other artists.” Focusing on the immediacy of her surroundings, Feng strengthens the link between the lived experience and the recorded experience, allowing creativity to thrive in the process from fact to fiction. In a way, it’s to capture the often fleeting imagined future of life. “I often think about dreams because living in Berlin was once the dream of my twenties,” says Feng. “Now that I’m here, inside that dream, life sometimes feels unreal – as if I might wake up at any moment and return to reality. So I try to record the traces of this dream-life, piece by piece.”