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Vanilla Chi On The Death Of The Ego And Making Books That Resist Being Read
Vanilla Chi's approach to independent publishing emphasizes creating immersive and performative reading experiences that challenge conventional narratives and encourage readers to slow down. This strategy highlights the importance of integrating diverse cultural references and methodologies in brand storytelling, ultimately fostering deeper connections with audiences through thoughtful design and content.
Creative Boom: Inspiration Print Vanilla Chi on the death of the ego and making books that resist being read Drawing on folklore, anthropology and Buddhist philosophy, the New York and New Haven-based artist and independent publisher creates publications that ask readers to slow down and breathe. Written By: Ayla Angelos 3 June 2026 "I'm a haunted living ghost wandering around the past, telling the stories of the forgotten, the avoided and the ignored," says Vanilla Chi. Born in Shenzhen, she studied clinical medicine in China for two years, dropped out and moved to New York to study illustration at the School of Visual Arts.
After graduating, she spent three years in Brooklyn as a freelance illustrator – working with The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek and the Olympic Games, among others – before enrolling in the graphic design MFA at Yale University School of Art in 2024. She is currently about to enter her final year, splitting her time between New York and New Haven.
Vanilla's practice spans illustration, graphic design and independent publishing through her studio, Pearl Slug Studio, driven by research and inquisitions into visual forms and behaviour – "the way people construct meaning through symbols, rituals, images, myths or even interfaces," she says.
"I'm often inspired by moments where belief and constructed reality begin to overlap: religious sacred sites, diagrams, folk practices, archives, surveillance images, typography, ruins, simulations." Daoist diagrams, Buddhist cosmology, anthropological texts, and sometimes more contemporary aspects, like the aesthetics of algorithmic feeds, are other points of reference. "A lot of my inspiration also comes from contradiction: chaos and order, sacredness and spectacle, intimacy and systems, transcendence and reconciliation." Clearly, Vanilla is not interested in self-expression in any conventional sense.
"Rather than expressing myself, I think I'm usually trying to build perceptual or embodied experiences where these tensions can coexist," she explains. Her process reflects that, too, beginning with an accumulation of essays, diagrams, symbols, archival materials, field recordings, and found objects – fragments that might at first seem unrelated. She compares it to Aby Warburg's atlas methodology, which uses boards of pinned-up images spanning high art and advertisements, to track how visual symbols and emotions "migrate" across different cultures and eras throughout history.
In this method, meaning surfaces through juxtaposition, and the medium, which can be a publication, an installation, a typeface, or a performance, reveals itself only once the conceptual structure does. Two recent projects show how this works in practice. Snakelike, Through These Grasses – Some Notes on Serpents and Portals is an accordion book developed from a reading performance by the poet Quinn Latimer.
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The article presents a unique perspective on independent publishing and brand storytelling that could influence design strategies, making it significant and relevant for professionals in the industry.