Iron Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design · 2026
Constructing The Intangible Conceptual Illustration
by Yuanying He
- A' Design Award 2026 Iron Winner in Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design
- Awarded April 15, 2026
- CLIENT: K3ntiv3
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 7,039
- Verification code D281496D59 · Verify this award
About Constructing The Intangible Conceptual Illustration
Constructing the Intangible explores memory as a process of reconstruction rather than preservation. Inspired by the ephemeral scent of childhood pomelo flowers, the work employs architectural elements such as cranes, grids, and misaligned stairs to visualize the structure of recollection. Memory is presented as an active act of assembling fragments of the past to construct present identity. Through a restrained structural language, the piece transforms an intangible sensory experience into a visible spatial form.
*Constructing The Intangible* emerges from contemporary illustration practices that synthesize digital precision with conceptual depth, creating visual experiences that function simultaneously as aesthetic objects and philosophical propositions. Working within traditions established by metaphysical painters, impossible geometry illustrators, and conceptual artists who employ architectural vocabulary as symbolic language, He constructs a paradoxical spatial environment where staircases multiply, intersect, and spiral in configurations that defy physical possibility yet maintain rigorous geometric logic. The compositional achievement lies in the work's ability to sustain visual coherence despite spatial impossibility—the radial symmetry anchored by the central golden keyhole creates mandala-like stability, while the isometric projection maintains consistent geometric rules even as it proposes architecturally impossible relationships. The chromatic sophistication manifests in the refined limitation to three primary tonal families—cool pale blues, warm soft yellows, and pure whites—deployed with exceptional control to create luminous atmospheric unity while maintaining clear hierarchical distinction between structural, organic, and atmospheric elements. The juxtaposition of hard-edged architectural precision against soft-edged botanical and cloud forms demonstrates technical versatility and creates productive visual tension between rational construction and organic growth, between human-made order and natural abundance. Thematically, the work invites contemplation of threshold experiences, transformative journeys, and the relationship between structure and freedom—the central keyhole functions as portal, destination, and origin simultaneously, while the endless circulation of staircases suggests both futility and infinite possibility, both confinement within rational systems and liberation through imaginative transcendence. The botanical elements, rendered with Art Nouveau-influenced decorative elegance, introduce themes of growth, fertility, and natural vitality into the geometric architectural space, suggesting synthesis between intellectual construction and organic flourishing, between mind and nature, between human aspiration and earthly rootedness. The surrounding clouds create atmospheric context that positions this impossible architecture in a liminal realm—neither fully earthbound nor entirely celestial, existing instead in imaginative space where normal physical constraints dissolve. The work's title suggests engagement with paradoxes of representation itself, with the challenge of visualizing abstract concepts, spiritual dimensions, or psychological states through concrete visual form—what does it mean to construct the intangible, to give architectural substance to ideas, feelings, or possibilities that resist material embodiment? The meticulous technical execution, evident in the precise geometric construction, refined color relationships, and sophisticated integration of diverse visual elements, demonstrates substantial illustrative skill placed in service of conceptual exploration rather than mere decorative effect. One might observe how the staircases, leading everywhere and nowhere, invite reflection on life's journeys, spiritual ascent, intellectual pursuit, creative process, or any endeavor characterized by striving, climbing, seeking—and perhaps on the recognition that destinations matter less than the quality of movement itself, that arrival proves less significant than the perpetual circulation between aspiration and grounding, between reaching upward and returning downward, between constructing meaningful structures and allowing space for organic growth and atmospheric wonder.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Constructing the Intangible explores the architecture of memory. This artwork examines how sensory fragments, specifically the ephemeral scent of the past, are reorganized. Memory is presented not as static preservation, but as an active secondary rendering shaped by narrative coherence. Utilizing a structural language bridging nature and architecture, the design transforms intangible sensory experiences into visible forms. Past fragments serve as scaffolding to support selfhood.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- High-resolution digital artwork.
Dimensions: 3600 x 3600 pixels.
Color space: RGB.
Format: Digital illustration suitable for print and screen display. - Tags
- memory reconstruction, olfactory memory, architectural metaphor, narrative identity, secondary construction, spatial abstraction, sensory memory, autobiographical memory
- Production Technology
- The artwork was created using digital illustration techniques. A structured grid-based composition system was applied to organize spatial elements. Layered vector and raster rendering methods were combined to achieve depth and architectural precision. The visual system references drafting language and construction schematics to reinforce the conceptual framework.
- Design Challenge
- The primary challenge was translating an invisible and ephemeral sensory experience into a coherent spatial structure. The work avoids literal representation of scent and instead constructs a layered architectural system to express memory reconstruction. Balancing structural precision with emotional ambiguity required careful control of composition, grid systems, and visual hierarchy.
- Project Duration
- The project was conceptualized and completed in February 2026 in Shenzhen, China.
- Operation Flow
- The viewer engages with the artwork through visual navigation. Misaligned staircases, cranes, and grid structures guide the eye toward a central focal point, mirroring the cognitive process of memory reconstruction. The interaction is interpretive rather than functional, inviting reflection rather than instruction.
- Research
- This project explores autobiographical memory reconstruction through visual metaphor. Drawing from narrative identity theory and cognitive psychology, it investigates how memory is not a fixed recording but an active reconstruction shaped by perception and storytelling. Olfactory memory, particularly childhood scent associations, serves as an anchoring mechanism to translate intangible sensory recall into spatial and architectural language.
- Inspiration
- The inspiration originated from a simple observation: describing a dream after waking is already an act of secondary representation and reconstruction. The cool scent of pomelo blossoms from childhood serves as a sensory anchor. This fleeting memory is deconstructed into an orderly “construction site”. Cranes, grids, and misaligned staircases symbolize the subtle imperfections and ongoing rebuilding inherent in human recollection.
- Image Credits
- All visual elements, illustrations, and conceptual content in this project are original works created solely by the artist. No third-party materials, stock images, templates, or external visual assets were used in the creation of this work.
- Patents
- This project is an original conceptual artwork created by the artist. It is not associated with any registered patents or trademarks. All intellectual property rights belong solely to the artist.
Colors of Constructing The Intangible Conceptual Illustration
Design Interview about Constructing The Intangible Conceptual Illustration
The inspiration came from a childhood moment of smelling pomelo blossoms — that fleeting, uncatchable sensation made me wonder: what actually is memory? Not an archive waiting to be opened, but something that's continuously being constructed. I wanted to give that invisible inner experience a visible form.
I'm continuing to explore "intangible perception." Right now I'm working on a series of interactive visual pieces that combine code and frame-by-frame animation, trying to translate the small, easily overlooked moments of everyday life into visual language.
The conceptual phase took quite a long time, I kept tearing things down and starting over. But once the theme was firmly established, the final work came together in one continuous flow.
It was entirely self-initiated — driven purely by my own inspiration, with no external brief or commission.
This series currently exists as an independent artistic work and has not been commercially licensed or mass-produced. I prefer to retain creative control over the work, though I remain open to the right collaborative opportunities in the future.
I have always been drawn to the question of how people perceive and construct a sense of self. For me, design is not only a tool for solving problems — it is also a way of thinking and asking questions.
"Constructing The Intangible" says exactly what the series is about. We can't hold onto memory or store a scent, yet we actively piece these fragments together into who we are right now. The word "constructing" matters. Memory isn't something that just happens to us; it's a form of self-creation we're constantly performing.
Adobe Photoshop and Procreate.
Using symbols with an engineering sensibility, like tower cranes and grids, to build something that is fundamentally fluid and emotional. People usually associate memory with softness and blur. I chose to handle it with a hard, structural language, and that contradiction is really the core of the work.
Finding the right balance between over-explaining and being too obscure. Memory is deeply personal, so if the visual language is too literal it loses its poetry, but if it's too opaque it disconnects from the viewer. Getting the work to carry depth while still being felt was the hardest part.
I wanted the work to go out and be seen by different eyes. The A' Design Award draws jurors from all over the world, and I was curious whether something rooted in personal memory and an Eastern sensory experience could still be understood across cultures.
This work carries a more private meaning for me. It's about how, through growth and loss, we keep asking and answering the question of who we are. I hope everyone who sees it finds their own pomelo blossom, and walks forward carrying that earlier version of themselves.
Grand Interview about Constructing The Intangible Conceptual Illustration
It didn’t arrive as a single revelation. I was deep in visual research when I noticed that construction imagery, cranes and scaffolding and exposed grids, carried something that organic forms couldn’t: a built-in sense of incompleteness. A building site is always mid-process. That felt structurally honest to what olfactory memory actually does. A scent doesn’t return a finished picture. It triggers a partial, ongoing reassembly, something still being built every time it’s accessed. Once I saw that parallel, the architectural vocabulary stopped being a stylistic choice and became a conceptual one. The language of construction gave me a way to show memory not as something retrieved but as something under continuous, imperfect reconstruction.
Designers tend to assume that if they can find the right image, they can make an internal experience legible. This framework disrupts that. If memory is genuinely reconstructive, then no single visual can claim to be the definitive version of what someone felt or remembered. That’s a humbling realization for anyone working in visual communication. It means the illustrator’s job isn’t to pin down an interior experience but to build a structure that leaves room for the viewer’s own reconstruction to happen inside it. And when the subject matter is this intimate, the ethical weight is real. You’re not illustrating someone else’s nostalgia. You’re proposing a model for how remembering works, and that model will shape how people understand their own recall. The responsibility is to stay honest about the instability of what you’re depicting, not to make it look more resolved than it actually is.
I never started with a complete sketch. The piece was built the way memory itself behaves: one element suggested the next, and each addition revised what came before. The contrast at the heart of the work emerged gradually, not by plan. Petals are soft, scent is formless, recollection blurs at the edges, yet the structures that carry them in the composition, scaffolding, staircases, grid lines, are rigid and precise. I didn’t choose that tension deliberately from the beginning. It revealed itself as I worked. I’d place something architectural and realize it needed something organic to breathe against, or I’d soften an area and find it had lost its meaning without a harder edge nearby. The compositional system grew through that back-and-forth. Drafts were discarded, elements were rebuilt, whole sections were rethought. In the end, the process mirrored the concept: nothing was retrieved intact from an original plan. Everything was reconstructed along the way, and sometimes the work carried me somewhere I hadn’t anticipated at all.
Illustration that deals with sensory experience and psychological interiority is often treated as personal work, something seen as expressive but not rigorous. Recognition within a juried competition like the A’ Design Award pushes back against that. It signals that conceptual illustration grounded in research and structured around an argument, not just an aesthetic, belongs in the same conversation as other forms of visual communication design. For me, the award didn’t validate the piece itself so much as the premise behind it: that translating invisible human experiences into visual systems is a legitimate design problem, not a self-indulgent exercise. If that idea gains ground in the broader industry, it opens space for more designers to treat subjective, sensory, and psychological subject matter with the same rigor and ambition they’d bring to any other brief.
There was a long stretch where the centre of the composition kept changing. I had mountains and plants filling that space, and I kept adding and removing them, never satisfied. The surrounding areas were already dense with architectural structure, and in the middle stood a solitary figure in front of a doorway. Every time I added organic elements back in, the figure disappeared into the noise. Eventually I stripped the centre down to just the figure, the door, and an added layer of staircase structure. That subtraction turned out to be the turning point. With the natural forms gone, the doorway became a real threshold, and the stairs became a path leading upward into the constructed landscape of memory surrounding it. The piece suddenly had directionality. It was no longer a scene to look at but a space to enter. That single decision, choosing emptiness over fullness at the centre, resolved the tension I’d been circling for weeks and gave the whole composition its emotional point of entry.
The process was far from linear. I began in Illustrator, sketching out the initial composition with vector forms, but the precision felt restrictive at that stage, so I moved into Procreate where the drawing could stay loose and responsive. For the architectural elements, the staircases and structural frames, I built three-dimensional models in Nomad Sculpt, which gave me spatial accuracy that flat drawing alone couldn’t provide. Those models were then imported back into Procreate as structural reference, and I painted over and around them, letting the hand-drawn layers interact with the modelled geometry. Once the colour and composition were largely resolved on the iPad, I brought everything into Photoshop for final texture work, detail refinement, and colour grading. Each tool shift changed how I saw the piece. Modelling the architecture in 3D made the spatial relationships concrete in a way that drawing hadn’t, and that ended up redirecting parts of the composition I thought were already settled. The technical process didn’t just execute the concept. It kept reshaping it, which in hindsight is consistent with the whole premise of the work: nothing is assembled once and left intact. It’s rebuilt at every stage.
Constructing The Intangible was never intended as a standalone piece. It was the first full articulation of a method I’ve continued to develop: extracting visual structure from experiences that have no inherent visible form. Since completing it, I’ve been working across a broader range of intangible subjects, memory, disappearance, love, and each one demands its own structural logic. Memory called for construction and scaffolding. Other subjects may call for entirely different spatial vocabularies. What carries over is the underlying approach: treating an invisible experience as a genuine design problem, doing the research to understand how it actually functions, and then finding a formal system that behaves the way the experience does, not one that merely illustrates it. As for the wider field, I think the intersection of memory research and visual communication is still largely unexplored. Most design work that touches psychology stays at the level of metaphor. There’s real room for practices that engage with cognitive and emotional research structurally, not decoratively, and I want my work to keep pushing in that direction.
The piece originates from the scent of pomelo blossoms, and that scent is cold. Sharp, clear, almost solitary. Yet the final palette reads as warm and luminous. That contradiction is deliberate but rarely discussed. I also think the production process deserves more attention. The work was rebuilt across multiple tools and rethought many times, sections demolished and reassembled at every stage. That process isn’t a behind-the-scenes detail. It’s the argument itself, enacted rather than depicted.
The structural coldness was never left to dominate on its own. The architectural forms are wrapped in plant life throughout the composition, and running through the centre is a river, drawn from a real detail: a small stream beneath the pomelo tree where the original scent memory is rooted. Water did a lot of the emotional work. It softened the rigidity of the built environment and introduced a sense of movement and openness that grids and staircases alone couldn’t carry. But the river also carries conceptual weight. It only flows forward. You can trace it upstream toward its source, but the water you find there is never the same water you remembered. That, for me, is one of the deepest reasons memory is reconstruction rather than retrieval. The current has already moved on. What we return to has changed simply because time has passed through it. Allowing that kind of layered, flowing element to coexist with the hard architectural framework is what kept the piece from becoming cold. The precision holds the structure. The water holds the feeling.
The most transferable lesson is probably the simplest one. The work that resonated most didn’t come from chasing trends or optimizing for efficiency. It came from stopping and looking inward. In a field that moves fast and rewards speed, the decision to sit with a personal sensory memory, something as quiet as the scent of a tree from childhood, and take it seriously as a design problem felt almost unreasonable at the time. But that’s exactly where the strength of the work came from. I think the experiences most worth translating into visual form are usually the ones that feel too small or too private to matter. They matter precisely because they’re universal at the root. Everyone has a scent that pulls them back somewhere. Everyone has a memory that rebuilds itself every time they reach for it. If you’re looking for subject matter with real weight, you probably don’t need to look further than your own interior life. The challenge is having the patience and honesty to stay there long enough to find the structure inside it.