I always would like to be a transmitter of romance, to explore some of the memories that I want to cherish through paintings.

We live together with so many intricate living beings, and memory is the container for our consciousness, storing the faintest connection between people and the social environment or the natural environment. People write diaries or take photos, but I want to keep collecting and hoarding short and small memory fragments by illustrating, so that these different emotions can span time and space, telling little stories in a simple but meticulous, ordinary and gentle way.

I specialize in using opaque watercolor as the primary tool for painting, with watercolor, gouache and colored pencil as secondary media. Different from light and airy watercolor works, I want to express a feeling of "this is from a memory", so I will deliberately reduce the saturation and contrast of the painting and blur the edges to create a dreamlike hazy feeling. I’m always more subjective in extracting the emotional tones and emphasizing the memorable details among the complicated information.

Mingxian Xiang is a London-based illustrator and 2D animator (b.1997, Guizhou, China). She graduated from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in 2023. Mingxian specializes in using watercolors to create paintings with dreamy colours. She has participated in exhibitions at prestigious venues in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Her work “Melancholy Life” was shortlisted in the Emerging Illustrator category of the V&A Illustration Awards 2024 in the UK. She also won the Self-Promotion Merit Award from the iJungle Illustration Awards 2024. Mingxian's work HAPPY BIRTHDAY and WAVE were selected for the Royal Watercolour Society Open 2025 group exhibition in March 2025.