About Me!

As a Chinese artist, Echo Zhang was born in Nanjing, China, and grew up beside the Yangzi River and Zijin Mountain. Founded around 495 BC, Nanjing has seen countless poets, scholars, and politicians leave their stories and artwork here over the centuries. Growing up in such a city full of historical anecdotes and legendary tales, Echo shows a great interest in art, history, and mythology, and her interests latterly become one of the most prevalent themes of her artworks. When Echo was an elementary school student, she has already begun to create series of simple comics that relate to Chinese history and folktales. After entering high school, Echo had an opportunity to take a world history class, which allowed Echo to get familiar with western history and culture as well as to think about the differences and similarities between her own culture and the foreign culture. 
Although Echo spend lots of years discussing disparities between different cultures, she still had difficulties fully express her thoughts through her artworks. Except serving audiences, Echo considers artworks are mirrors that reflect the personality, personal interests, and personal growth of their creators. Echo knows expressing one’s thoughts will never be easy, and she understands this difficulty is an eternal challenge for lots of artists. However, she also believes that she can overcome this challenge through insisting on being herself, expanding her knowledge, and practicing her artistic skills.
Besides, Echo considers changing approach can also be a very effective method to help her express her thoughts. Echo begins with traditional media, such as watercolor and charcoal, to make artworks. However, after gating her first drawing tablet in high school, Echo realized digital painting was more convenient and effective. After entering college, Echo became a 3D modeling artist and learned several modeling skills and software. For Echo, changing approaches not only helps her to express her thoughts more completely, but also allowed her to view herself from multiple aspects as well.
Additionally, Echo is also a big fan of video games and fantasy fiction. Starts in elementary school, Echo spent plenty of time reading Neil Gaiman and J. R. R. Tolkien’s works while playing Ubisoft and Fromsoftware’s video games. These fictions and video games always inspired Echo to rethink her own artworks. Echo’s favorite Chinese translator Mu Dan once said that the duty of a translator is not only to translate one language into another language, but also to introduce the culture with an understandable language to other people. Dan’s idea impresses Echo deeply, which offers her an opportunity to insist on expressing her understanding of historical events and world mythology through creating drawings and video games.
Currently, Echo is working on a video game project that is related to Western popular culture and Asian traditional myths. Although Echo has never done such a project before, she’s like to take a try and see how far she could actually reach.