Hoi Chan’s glowing editorial commissions conjure the colour and weightlessness of sea creatures

Illustrating an editorial commission is no simple task. Not only do you have to create a piece that catches the eye of the reader and draws them in, but you’ve also got to pay close attention to the words of the article you’re depicting, ensuring its sentiment is visually translated. Someone who knows this all too well is Hoi Chan, a New Orleans-based illustrator whose dreamy artworks have been seen in the likes of Bloomberg, The New Yorker, Wired and many more.

Over time, Hoi has honed a pretty seamless process to complete commissions. It begins with a good scour of the brief and some brainstorming, all completed in the morning hours for optimum productivity. After reading the first draft of the article, Hoi will jot down ideas and short phrases that best describe the possible setting, feelings induced by the article to be woven into the illustration. “This initial stage of idea development is particularly intriguing for me,” says Hoi. “I often discuss this process with fellow illustrators to understand their approaches, and it seems that everyone has their own ‘magic hours’ and methods to kickstart a project.”

After core ideas are developed and sketches are completed, Hoi moves onto the colour scheme, which is usually inspired by underwater creatures. “Their colours possess a blend of gentleness and brightness that I believe imparts a sense of softness to my work,” he says. This stylistic choice shines in a recent commission for The New Yorker: Close Contact, a piece that accompanied an article about Ben Lerner’s new book, The Lights, a prose poetry hybrid that explores the world “as if it were an alien”, says Hoi. To reflect the poetic, celestial and world-view-challenging nature of the work, Hoi depicted a glowing figure being peacefully enveloped in pink sweeping shapes, similar to the tendrils of jellyfish.

Since we last caught up with Hoi in 2020, his style has been on quite a journey, his palettes are now much more restrained and his characters more fully fleshed and uniform. Hoi says his work is predominantly inspired by a greater connection to his natural surroundings. Spending his younger years in Hong Kong and now living in New Orleans, he finds great inspiration in tropical temperatures. The “humidity-laden breeze, lush vegetation and abundant rainfall” have all come together to influence Hoi’s glowing works.

In another recent commission, Hoi was enlisted to create a work for an article on Figma’s blog, Shortcut, which digs into the company’s internal engineering crits process. Hoi says that the team wanted to use the metaphor of “tending to a garden”, to simplify the pretty technical topic. Perfectly suiting Hoi’s naturalistic instincts, he illustrated a glowing, conceptual garden, with flora connected by glowing lines and beads, reflecting the nature of coding. “I enjoy working on technology-related themes because, while they are part of our daily lives, there is often limited visual representation, allowing for abstract ideas and creative freedom,” says Hoi.

Now Hoi is immersing himself in a process of experimentation, looking to add movement to his work with animation and taking his love of incorporating words into the creative process further, exploring the ways the phrases throughout his sketchbook might be turned into abstract poems, and compiled into a short zine.