Forgotten Kingdom 寂静深处

Li Zhizhen

From traditional ink painting to digital worlds — an IB student crafting stories across animation, games, and interactive media.

IB Predicted 39/42 Pinghe International School Class of 2027
Traveler's Notes

About Me

Li Zhizhen

Li Zhizhen, Class of 2026

I grew up learning Chinese ink painting on rice paper. The breathing space of shan-shui taught me to see what is not drawn — and that lesson became the lens through which I now build animation, games, and interactive worlds.

Name Li Zhizhen / 李致臻
Affiliation Pinghe International School, Class of 2027
Target Animation / Game Design / Interactive Media / Ink Painting
Specialties Ink Painting / Digital Drawing / 2D Animation / Game Prototyping / Storyboarding

To admissions officers: portfolio PDFs and recommendation references are available on request.

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Field Notes

My Daily

This Is Me

Four moments, one artist.

🏆 Best Oral

ICDS 2025 — Youth Innovation Session

3rd International Conference on Design Science, Shanghai. Presented "Games / Animation / Design." Awarded Best Oral — one of only two student recipients.

July 25–26, 2025Shanghai, China
帧

Storyboard Doodles

Thumbnails that map emotion before they map scenes.

Ember

Community Service

When the city paused, a small light kept moving between doors.

Pandemic Community Volunteer Service, Shanghai. During the lockdown, I joined my community as a frontline volunteer — assisting with testing, delivering supplies, and caring for the elderly. To honor the fellow volunteers who risked so much, I adapted the song "There Are So Many People in This World," writing new lyrics and set to a series of my own paintings. The short video spread widely through volunteer group chats, moving countless people who served their communities at personal risk, and was later affirmed by the Shanghai municipal government and published on its official platform.

Shanghai · 2022 Adapted song · new lyrics · paintings Published on Shanghai Municipal Platform
Reels

Animation Works

Sketchbook

My Dreams, My Friends, My Original Characters

Character Design · 2019–2025

童年时,我常常被困在一座地下迷宫里。走廊折叠成不可能的角度,影子一样的物质在身后追逐。我没有被这些梦击垮,反而拿起笔,把梦里的人物和怪兽一一画下。渐渐地,他们从恐惧变成了朋友,从草稿本的角落走进了属于我的原创宇宙。

As a child, I was often trapped in an underground labyrinth. Corridors folded into impossible angles, and shadow-like substances chased behind me. Instead of being crushed by these dreams, I picked up a pen and drew every figure and monster that appeared. Gradually, they transformed from fear into friends, stepping out from the corners of my sketchbook into an original universe of my own.

影子物质The Shadow Substances

没有固定形状,像墨汁滴入水中般游动。它们不是敌人,只是尚未被命名的情绪。当我在纸上给它们勾勒出轮廓,它们便从追逐者变成了引路人。

Shapeless, drifting like ink dropped into water. They are not enemies, only emotions yet to be named. Once I outlined them on paper, they stopped chasing and began guiding.

几何猎手The Geometry Hunter

手持一柄只能发射数学方程式与几何图形的枪。在梦中,我用它击穿迷宫的墙壁;在纸上,它变成了一把尺子、一支圆规,帮我把混乱的梦切成可理解的形状。

Armed with a gun that fires only mathematical equations and geometric figures. In dreams, I used it to break through labyrinth walls; on paper, it became a ruler and compass, cutting chaotic dreams into understandable shapes.

错角回廊The Impossible Corridor

一段应该向下却没有向下的楼梯,一个折叠成错误角度的走廊。它不会带你去任何地方,却让你学会在迷失中保持前行。

A staircase that should descend but doesn't, a corridor folded into a wrong angle. It leads nowhere, yet teaches you to keep moving while lost.

呼吸植物The Breathing Plants

看起来像植物,却在微微起伏,像在呼吸。它们把无声的生长与焦虑的脉搏画在了一起,提醒我即使在最幽暗的梦里,生命也在悄悄进行。

They look like plants, yet rise and fall as if breathing. They weave silent growth with anxious pulse, reminding me that even in the darkest dreams, life continues quietly.

边缘溶解者The Edge-Walkers

身体的边缘溶解进纸面,仿佛下一秒就会消失。他们是我对“不被看见”的恐惧,也是我对“超越边界”的渴望。

Their bodies dissolve into the page, as if they might vanish the next second. They are my fear of being unseen, and my longing to cross beyond boundaries.

帧Frame by Frame

Frame by Frame

A curated collection of animation exercises and gesture studies.

Trials

Game Works

访谈中,李致臻谈了为什么想做游戏、以及她心目中"好设计"的样子。以下均为她的原话:

“设计的巧妙之处就是没有设计——实际上就让玩家自己去探索。最好的设计,不是粗暴地告诉玩家"你要去那里",而是玩家感觉不到被安排,像自己走到了那里。这跟"看不见的设计师"是一回事:设计师创造一个场景,由玩家自己设计体验。”

ENThe cleverest design is design you don't notice — the player never feels directed, yet arrives as if they found the way themselves. It's the "invisible designer": the designer builds the stage, and the player designs their own experience.

“制作游戏的过程,以及猜测我的玩家会怎么做、怎么反应的过程,比较吸引人。这就是我想要学习游戏开发的核心原因。”

ENWhat pulls me in is the act of making a game — and guessing how my players will act and react. That's the core reason I want to study game development.

“游戏是一种下限极低、上限极高的亲民艺术——你可以把它当消磨时间的工具,也可以把它当深度解析的艺术品。它既有视觉美感,又有强互动;制作者还能在里面埋彩蛋,表达自己对一些事情的观点。”

ENA game is an accessible art form — very low floor, limitless ceiling. You can treat it as a time-killer or read it as a profound artwork. It has visual beauty and strong interactivity; a maker can bury Easter eggs inside to voice their own views.

“编程只是把想法做出来的工具,但策划决定游戏怎么走、角色怎么发展。只有想清楚了才能做出来。” 她想做的,是"一个用留白代替说教、用探索代替指引的游戏"。

EN"Programming is just the tool that turns ideas into reality, but design decides where the game goes and how characters grow. Only when you've thought it through can you actually build it." The world she wants to build: "a game that uses negative space instead of preaching, and exploration instead of instruction."

— 李致臻 / 访谈原话
Echoes

Interactive Works

白The Void

The Void

Digital media experiment: what happens when the audience fills the blank?

2024Experiment
言不尽意 · 展览海报特写

Words Fall Short / 言不尽意

VS*CS collaborative interactive installation: suspended telephones in a curtained space — each receiver carries an unheard voice.

2025Interactive Installation

关于交互作品,李致臻说自己追求的,是一种"看不见的引导":

“不指定你必须按什么,而是随着你需要的时候,你就知道该点什么。”

ENIt never dictates what you must press — instead, when you need it, you simply know what to click.

— 李致臻 / 访谈原话
Sculpture

My Memory

Memory is not a faithful record of the past, but a material — continually reshaped by time, emotion, and experience.

Installation

Residue — Specimens of a Long Memory

Mixed-media installation · 2025

残忆标本 树的全景

我想探讨一个活了极久的人,记忆最终会变成什么。我不把记忆当作对过去的忠实记录,而把它看作一种材料——被时间、情感与经验不断重塑。

四种材料承载这一想法。石,封存埋得最深的记忆;木,以年轮与伤痕标记一生的流逝与衰老;铁丝,被反复弯折缠绕,既是记忆之间的联结,也是它们之间的混乱;织物贴近身体与日常,收纳那些难以言说、却由触觉、气味与感官唤回的记忆。

我用灼烧、风化、浸泡、纠缠去对待它们,直到焦痕、锈蚀、褪色、变形、碎裂逐一出现。这些损伤正是关键:它呈现记忆如何在时间里衰退、变异,又被重建。标本瓶与培养皿,是我们保存与检视记忆的努力;可它们留存的,从来不是过去本身,而只是时间穿行其后留下的残迹。

我把这些"记忆标本"悬上一株枯树——树是时间与生命终结的象征,树旁那具铁丝人形,则是一个人沉溺于自身回忆的模样。活得越久,记忆越是碎散,而一个由碎片、痕迹、失落与情感筑成的主观世界,也越发完整地属于自己。这破碎,究竟是丧失,还是一种自我的重新书写?

I want to ask what the memory of someone who has lived a very long time eventually becomes. I do not treat memory as a faithful record of the past, but as a material — continually reshaped by time, emotion, and experience.

Four materials carry the idea. Stone holds memories buried deepest in the mind. Wood, with its growth rings and natural scars, marks a life's passage and the work of ageing. Wire, endlessly bent and tangled, stands both for the links between memories and for the confusion among them. Fabric, bound to the body and the everyday, keeps what cannot be said but returns through touch, smell, and sensation.

I act on these materials — burning, exposing, soaking, entangling — until charring, corrosion, fading, deformation, and fragmentation appear. The damage is the point: it shows how memory, over time, deteriorates, mutates, and is rebuilt. The specimen jars and petri dishes are our effort to preserve and to study memory. Yet what they keep is never the past itself, only its residue after time has passed through it.

Finally, I suspend these "memory specimens" from a dead tree — the tree a symbol of time and the end of life, and the wire figure beside it, a person sunk into their own recollections. The longer we live, the more memory scatters; yet the more completely a private, subjective world is built from what remains: traces, losses, feeling. Is this fragmentation a loss — or a rewriting of the self?

残忆标本 图版 02
残忆标本 图版 03
残忆标本 图版 04
残忆标本 图版 05
Roots

My Ink Paintings

My earliest language — ink, paper, and the discipline of looking.

作为从小习画的人,李致臻对"留白"有自己的理解:

“不用一笔一还原,抓住神态就好;画面看似没填满,观感却是满的、平衡的。”

ENYou don't reproduce everything stroke by stroke — you capture the spirit. The picture looks unfinished, yet feels complete and balanced.

— 李致臻 / 访谈原话
Broadcast

My Vlog

录

Portfolio Behind the Scenes

From sketch to screen: how I build a shot.

Watch on YouTube →
游

Game Jam 48h

Sleep-deprived, coffee-fueled, wall-breaching.

Watch on YouTube →
Beacon

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