Hiders

Hiders begins with a conversation that never happened—an imagined exchange with my late uncle who passed away before I was born. Created during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, this graphic memoir reflects on how grief, absence, and family secrets quietly shape who we become. It begins with the death of my grandfather from COVID-19, a loss complicated by the lies my family told to protect one another from the pain of reality. As I wrestle with generational trauma and obscured family histories, the story serves as a meditation on the ways in which we connect, protect, and misinterpret each other. The story, too, wrestles with the ethical conundrum of writing about the dead, trying to address the questions of what we owe them and how stories can expose the truth but also obscure it.
You can read the full book here: https://yimiaowangart.com/hiders

water color, collage, oil pastel

I wrote the story several years prior to the time I turned it into a picture book. I decided to make the picture book around 40 pages, then I divided the paragraphs into groups to fit in the pages. I then started to storyboard based on the groups.

I kinda don't remember what I did at this stage, but I'm a messy artist and liked to make creative decisions instinctively, so I just went wild :)

Yay--I spent around 2 months on finishing 18 spreads (36pages). The process was not linear, I skipped around my initial storyboard and make whatever pages I felt like to make that day. Once the drawings were done, I scanned them in and adjust the brightness and contrast digitally.