Zijing directly photographed a sketch book, while using a Siri voice virtually to fulfill the sketch book’s storytelling, which was edited into the creative short film My Sketch Book Tells Its Stories, with “Hug London, hug myself” at the end.

Sketch book has changed the way people tell stories, to some extent. From the common language-based conversation, interview, narrative, meeting, etc., to drawing, doodling, writing, and noting whatever they want on paper, to turning it into a small sketch book, a dive-back reading from the end to the beginning, the same as the feeling of peeling an onion (Latin name: Allium cepa) layer by layer. Sometimes people shed tears as they peel, they may see something they once loved inside. Sometimes people may taste the sweetness instead because one’s onion occasionally adds a kind of flavor to the dish-like-life.

Zijing’s experimental work ranges from the L’Ingénu by Voltaire to Cubic painting research, including acrylic paintings on paper with their experiments, resin, and bandage photography, and recently a completed short film named Bandages Experiments III: Tasting and Melting.

The bandages itself may also convey emotions in our own stories. Therefore, we usually say the story better be with the wine. We may get some sweetness after a small sip, the wine may also warms our stomach the first and heart the second. In this new experiment, Zijing put some bandages with graffiti and words into the glass and poured the Spanish wine with it.

The Journey is the Reward is a mirror of 7 art and design works from September to October 2022. These selected works are as follows:

• L’Ingénu + Continued Works at the RCA: L’Ingénu, which is a fine art work created by Zijing, that has been moving forward at the RCA. It continues to be relevant to the direction and keywords of Zijing’s research today. [A]MAZE has included its continued works, Bandages Experiments III: Tasting and Melting.
• Get the Blossom I Have Ever Bleed: Huadao in Chinese, is a milestone of Zijing’s research and practice within graphic design. His current research interests, such as texts and images, stories, and emotions, originated from this work.
  
• Between Worlds: An experimental graphic design work largely used texts and images that tells Zijing’s stories from his private social media. View the artworks.
  
• Can You See Her: An experimental work of text and image, made in collaboration with Garance Paule Querleu, it was shown by Zijing in a RCA MRes Across Pathway course. View the artworks.
  
• Allium Cepa: A theoretical work centred on Zijing’s sketch book.
• Model of Story Creations: A conceptual model that allowed Zijing to explore all kinds of connections from various areas.
• Perceiving the Images: Another fascinating concept which was created by Zijing.

In February 2023, at the exhibition “[A]MAZE: Exploratory Journeys”, Zijing used a rope and a stapler to connect the practical works of the past year. For this reason, the story line is an interesting method, which allows the audience to quickly observe the flow of time, and there is a connection between another event.

The book [A]MAZE on display in the exhibition features the ongoing work of Zijing and other seven artists and designers from the RCA, a series of their individual interview projects or works, complemented by eight concrete cubes. The exhibition tells the story of each artist and designer, their diverse approaches to research and learning, without limitation, and explores their various modes of thinking.

“The answer of timeline. The magic timeline. We can be both of god and the devil. Since we’re trying to raise the dead. Against the stream of time. To the one who meets me. The one who wants to be s storyteller. The one who wants to be an artist. The one who wants to do anything valuable. The one who wants to care about one-selves. The one who wants to care about the strangers. The one who wants to make things for the other. To some fascinating experiences. The memory that belongs to a family. The memory that belongs to a lover. The memory that belongs to a homeless. The memory that belongs to a hierarchy. The memory that belongs to human beings. The memory that belongs to nobody. Give birth to the flowers in the sky. Grow up a bit while touching it. Struggle at that planted cosmos. Enjoy the wound make it easy. Tell ’em stories in couple of days. Believe in some you’ve never seen. Hide in crown’s jewelry decos. A series carvings faded all away. You ask me about that shauri. Like a she travelling in the ocean. 時の流れに人は逆らえないもの…それを無理矢理ねじ曲げようとすれば…人は罰を受ける。”
Zijing Zhong, Royal College of Art

In April 2023, after the interesting method of storyline was introduced, The White Dove began to have a new exploration of linear narrative. Zijing borrowed a sentence said by the girl in his favourite Japanese anime Detective Conan.

“時の流れに人は逆らえないもの…それを無理矢理ねじ曲げようとすれば…人は罰を受ける。”
Ai Haibara, Detective Conan

The culture of “reversing time” in animation spreads among different countries. Sitting on the time machine to find the connection point, Zijing has a new dialectical thinking. That is to say, the two points connecting the past and today are not all beautiful, and may also bring disaster to yourself.

The meaning of The White Dove, to some extent, is a Rosetta Stone of time in Zijing’s narrative research.

When it comes to “Minuscul-La vallée des fourmis perdues”, the CGI creatures enter the real world and present a delightful screen with anthropomorphic dialogue of insects, mapping our human society as well. As one of the main characters, the ladybug (Coccinellidae) gives us a unique perspective on how the transmission of information may be real in the animal kingdom, but also contains details of the transmission of information that may have been derived from research. For ladybugs or other insects, perhaps their transmission and accumulation on information exists largely based on genetic memory, while humans are likewise relying on invisible tools behind us later, the Internet, a human-created information carrier, to divide our information into spaced, over-the-air, or fully enclosed interlayers in the virtual world.

What is known, well, about human society compared to the animal kingdom is that we got similar hybrid conversational communities and the information towers, belonging to us. The transmission of information from the physical world to the Internet has an upward trend, which also has a zigzag, spiral or vertical journey, and the things we could know (millions of years of history and culture) and the things we do not exactly know at all (scientific and technological breakthroughs) can be added to the information towers within the Internet, and we are in an episode of climbing higher and higher in the process of dialogue that whole-benefits from this huge net. The word “climbing” in Chinese has changed from “Action Status” to the “Internet Slang”, and it may slow at “Behind the Information” then. I thought it’s a generic word for our own behaviors, or like the behavior of others, in exploring the information towers. Thus, the Coccinellidae project is centered on information itself, and it aims to push us to share more thoughts about it.

Anyway, in the process of shifting my own vision from the animal kingdom to the human society, especially in the hours of re-watching this animated film, I recalled that I tried to build several 3D models of ladybugs in different mapping in the software a few years ago, also, the photo taken this summer of a live ladybug lying on the testing paper that I dyed with vegetable dyes, which were some interesting connections. Finally, I intended to show the ladybug again as a very important role directly in the later information-based design. After showing the ladybug as one of the design elements of the Coccinellidae project, the next session will focus on 3 topics related to information through dialogue.

• The instant information that have been corrupted (by the proliferation of virtual world like the Internet).
• The ambiguity (of reflection and management) caused by information redundancy and its traceability.
• Respect established in internal and external contexts (by conversational communities).

By 2023, the Coccinellidae project will allow everyone to engage fully in the dialogue, by using invitation or free choice participating.

Zijing Zhong, Designer

The cinematography creates a large amount of research and practice to Zijing’s narrative research journeys, for example the film/filmmaking theories and graphic elements in his graphic design works before. Well, the journey matters, not only it comes from the exterior cinematic world, but also like this part, Zijing created his own beautiful stories and films through his own eyes, camera and lens.