2021 Winner

Jury Statement

We chose Pei-Hsin Cho for the SM Award because of the energy of her line and her richly layered sense of space––and of the page. Her work is unusual, with perspectives that invite the viewer into both the expansiveness of space and the depths of a character's inner realm. There is abundant promise here, with Cho, young as she is, boldly exploring and visually recording forms and feelings in ways that surprise, thereby inviting the eye to linger on the world that she delineates and opens for us to see.

Pei-Hsin is a Taiwanese visual storyteller with a particular focus on illustration and animation, currently based in London. Her work is narrative-based that challenges the possibilities in visual storytelling. She combines traditional and digital mediums to create delicate and atmospheric animations and illustrations. Her work depicts a variety of inward feelings that attempt to transcribe subtle emotions into tangible and visually tactile images. Personal sentiments are always present in Pei’s work, wrapped with rational narration to catalyse unaccessible subjective experiences and memory fragments.