Nicole Hénusse

My practice brings together narrative, illustration and graphic design. I begin by looking at a subject in context: the text and its reader for a book, the idea carried by an article, or the real activity behind an identity.

I work in gouache, watercolour, pastel, charcoal and ink, then can finish the image through digital painting or vector work. The project determines the technique. Drawing, composition, light and material remain the common foundation.

My training in design, followed by visual anthropology and political science, informs this attention to context without defining the practice on its own.

Nicole Hénusse has drawn since childhood. She trained in a private art studio, then at a specialist art school: she is a fine artist and illustrator first. In her graduating year she won the 2D image stream of the Image-Video Competition run by the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong, and the press reported on it. She received the Hong Kong Most Outstanding Visual Art Student Award, and her work was exhibited at the Central Library in Hong Kong, the city’s largest library. Design came later, at the PolyU School of Design in Hong Kong, one of the twenty-five best art and design schools in the QS world ranking: typography and layout, software, brand identity. There she earned her BA Design and received the Talent Development Scholarship of the Hong Kong government, culture, arts and design stream, and served as art director and executive editor of the university’s Student Press Committee. She then took that way of looking outside the studio, with an MA in Social Anthropology and Visual Ethnography at the University of Kent, and a master’s degree in political science at the Université libre de Bruxelles. That sequence shapes the way she works: look at a subject in its context for a long time, then make an image that holds without a caption.

Under her maiden name, Nicole Au Yeung, she was a finalist in the COPIC AWARD for The Lovers, and shortlisted for the Hong Kong Human Rights Art Prize. Her images have been exhibited at the Goethe-Gallery in Hong Kong, at Momijiya Honkan in Kyoto and at Loft, Metro City, in Shanghai, as well as in Illustrating Anthropology, an online exhibition in the United Kingdom supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute. She is also the author of a paper on animated illustration as a language, presented in the United Kingdom at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Conference.

The pieces behind these distinctions are in the archives.