Between Innocence and Reality is a duo exhibition featuring works by Lin Cheng and Jiarui Jiang, two illustrators whose practices engage visual storytelling as a critical and poetic tool. Rooted in children’s imagery while extending into socially engaged narratives, the exhibition examines how childhood, care, and vulnerability intersect with lived experience, memory, and resistance.

Through illustration, artist’s books, mixed media works, and narrative-based projects, both artists explore how softness, imagination, and humour can coexist with urgency and emotional depth. Rather than treating childhood as a space of innocence alone, the exhibition frames it as a site of perception—where fear, care, resilience, and social awareness quietly take form.

Lin Cheng’s practice moves between picture books, illustration, and cross-media storytelling, often addressing themes of memory, emotional survival, and gendered experience. Her works draw on personal narratives and metaphor to reflect on domestic space, silence, and vulnerability, transforming intimate experiences into visual resistance through poetic imagery.

In contrast, Jiarui Jiang focuses on children’s picture books and hand-painted mixed media illustration, celebrating nature, humour, and everyday wonder. Her vibrant use of colour and material experimentation creates playful yet reflective narratives, where curiosity and imagination become ways of understanding the world.

Together, the exhibition positions visual storytelling as a shared language—one that allows tenderness and resistance to coexist. Between Innocence and Reality invites viewers to slow down, observe, and reflect on how childhood perspectives continue to shape emotional landscapes well into adulthood, offering storytelling as a space for empathy, connection, and quiet transformation.

Lin Cheng
Lin Cheng is a Chinese visual artist and illustrator based in the UK. Working across illustration, artist’s books, animation, and cross-media visual storytelling, her practice explores childhood, memory, vulnerability, and care. Moving between children’s imagery and socially engaged visual art, she creates poetic narrative spaces that balance tenderness and resistance. Her work has been exhibited and recognised internationally.

Jiarui Jiang
Jiarui Jiang is an illustrator from China based in Cambridgeshire. Her practice centres on children’s picture books and hand-painted mixed media illustration, often combined with digital textures. Drawing inspiration from nature, humour, and everyday moments, her work celebrates imagination, curiosity, and the quiet joy found in ordinary life.

Curated by
ArtFlow Studio
Hongqian Zhang

Volunteers
Wenxi Yu
Jingxiang Wang
Yunqian Lv
Xiangyu Zhang