Featured Artist
Wanqing Zhang

Wanqing Zhang is a New York-based designer working at the intersection of graphic design and installation. Her practice focuses on complex social issues, such as mental health and gender equality, by translating research and insights into tangible design systems. She explores how design can shape understandings of identity and memory, and how it can respond to real-world problems faced by specific groups of people. Adopting a mixed media approach, she treats different media as carriers of meaning. Through video (Film), digital interface design, user experience design, and printed work, she builds systems that offer responses to particular questions or call public attention to important issues. Her work has been recognized with multiple international awards, including the Muse Design Award, Muse Creative Award, and IDA. 

This project focuses on a pressing and concerning issue in contemporary Chinese society: Many Chinese parents often fail to adequately detect or neglect depression in their adolescent children during the upbringing process. The design project aims to systematically analyze the complex causes behind this neglectful behavior by integrating perspectives from Chinese Cultural Response to depression, Social Structural Transformation, and Traditional Cultural Values, conducting a multi-level and cross-dimensional exploration. 

It seeks to raise public awareness of the high prevalence, hidden nature, and detrimental effects of adolescent depression, while highlighting the urgency of early identification and effective intervention. The project also intends to provide insights for fostering collaboration among family support, public attention, and professional prevention and treatment efforts.  My inspiration comes from my own experience with depression. I noticed that most apps focus on meditation or mood tracking, but they don’t offer a real human connection. So I set out to build something different: a space that helps users understand their mental state， connect with others who truly relate. Chinese Adolescent Depression just won the Gold Award in the Book Design for Social Change category at the 2026 Indigo Design Award.

This installation creates a phenomenological field of “seeing” and “being seen” through the interplay of light and shadow on its surface. Each shift in external light or in the position of the viewer’s handheld light generates a unique, unrepeatable pattern of reflection across its material interfaces. This is not merely a physical interaction but also a metaphor for the becoming of perception: art is not a static object, but an existence constantly reinterpreted and reshaped within relational networks the moment a subject engages with it. 

In terms of material choice, the sharp edges of broken glass, the permeable grid of metal mesh, reflective spherical forms, and controllable light sources together constitute a visual “liminal field.” They capture and distort, reflect and conceal, suggesting the fragmented nature of truth, the limits of perception, and the epistemic reality that meaning always emerges through multiple refractions. Thus, the work invites viewers to contemplate: what we see – is it the essence of art, or a provisional construct woven from our own gaze and the situated context? And the ever-changing light becomes a fluid poetics of understanding, encounter, and possibility. 

Semicolon is a digital companion designed for the journey ahead. It adapts to users’ real-time needs and milestones, guiding them to take small, meaningful steps toward lasting change. At its core, the app operates through intuitive touch and voice interactions. Users begin by logging daily moods, which the Mood Energy Level System translates into an energy score, data that drives personalized recommendations. Key touchpoints include a chat interface with Semmi AI for emotional release, a matching dashboard that connects users with shared experiences, an activity feed featuring energy-matched events, and a private journal for voice or text entries. What sets Semicolon apart is its ability to transform passive tracking into active healing.

By adapting content to users’ real-time states, it delivers support that is responsive rather than static. AI-powered pacing recommends connections and resources based on current capacity, meeting users where they are without overwhelming them. The app evolves alongside its users, reducing isolation through genuine peer support and judgment-free witnessing. Ultimately, Semicolon is not just a tool. It is an invitation to reconnect. With oneself. With others. With life. Through this project, I aim to offer those living with depression something more than coping mechanisms, a genuine solution rooted in connection and care. Semicolon App won the Gold Award in the Apps for Digital Design category, as well as the Winner in Digital Tools and Utilities for Digital Design. Silver Awards in the UX, Interface & Navigation for Digital Design and Branding categories.

more. www.ritazhangdesign.wixsite.com