03 / ABOUT
Filmmaker & Visual Artist
LANJIAN WANG
Biography
Lanjian Wang is a Chinese-American filmmaker and visual artist whose practice moves across film, animation, generative cinema, and media art. Trained in illustration at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she develops projects across writing, world-building, art direction, original drawing, generative image-making, animation, editing, sound design, and audiovisual rhythm.
Her work treats the visual world not as decoration, but as the narrative body itself. Drawing from Eastern and Western cultural traditions, mythology, and philosophical inquiry, she explores desire, mortality, power, morality, technological change, and speculative futures. Her recent moving-image work extends a hand-drawn visual practice into cinematic form, combining authored image systems with emerging generative tools while maintaining a strong emphasis on directorial agency and cohesive audiovisual storytelling.
Practice
Her practice begins with image-making. Hand-drawn digital illustration and charcoal drawing form its visual foundation, while film allows those images to unfold through time, sound, and movement.
She is interested in building complete worlds in which narrative, image, motion, editing, and sound emerge from a single directorial logic. Generative tools are used as part of this process rather than as its subject: a means of extending authored visual systems, exploring transformation, and shaping movement beyond the static image.
Across film and visual work, she repeatedly returns to tensions between tenderness and violence, longing and law, memory and disappearance, individual desire and larger systems of order.