YY (Yue Yang, Atelier YY)
Instagram | Vonixix@gmail.com
InfoYue Yang (YY) is a multidisciplinary designer and art director born in China and raised across Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne. Her work bridges design strategy, cultural translation, and visual storytelling, blending East-Asian sensitivity and philosophy with a French-inflected aesthetic.
YY creates design systems that connect conceptual clarity with emotional depth, crafting identities, publications, and visual worlds that move between structure and story. Based mainly in Narrm/Melbourne, she also works between Beijing, Shanghai, Paris, and Bourges.
Education2021 - 2022
Master of Design
RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
2019 - 2020
Graduate Diploma of Early Childhood Education
RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
2014 - 2018
Bachelor of Design (Textile & Graphic)
UNSW, Sydney, Australia
Experiences2016 - Current
Freelance Designer & Illustrator
I’ve worked with:
Alliance Française de Sydney
Australia Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
Musuem of Chinese Australian History
Open House Melbourne
Committee for Melbourne
M33
Liminal Magazine
Bowen Street Press
2023 - 2025
Head of Creatives & In-house Designer
Somage Fine Foods Australia
2019 - 2022
Early Childhood Teacher while freelancing and studying
Table of Content
Graphic Design
printed matter
art direction
Visual Identity
Visual Identity
Book Design
2025
2023 - 2025
2022
2022
2022
Illustrations2025
2025
2022
2022
Researchcopyright @ Atelier YY 2025Research: The Upcycled Museum of Curiosities
What if waste could dream again — if the scraps we cast aside began whispering new worlds into being?
This project, Upcycle Provocation, reimagines discarded objects as agents of storytelling, pedagogy, and play. Through illustration and speculative design, it constructs a world where packaging becomes textile, waste becomes language, and imagination becomes a sustainable act.
Rooted in early childhood creativity and material literacy, the work transforms upcycling from a process of repair into a philosophy of wonder — a way to think, learn, and design otherwise.
01. MATERIAL LITERACYEvery object has a voice — we’ve simply forgotten how to listen.
Receipts, wrappers, and fragments of foil are not leftovers but syllables of a forgotten language. When scanned, layered, and collaged, they form a grammar of gloss, crease, and residue. Material literacy is the act of learning to read this texture — to see plastic as metaphor, packaging as poetry, waste as narrative.
In doing so, sustainability ceases to be a moral instruction and becomes an aesthetic literacy, teaching us how perception itself can be re-stitched.
02. STORY NARRATIVE
AS PROVOCATION
Here, narrative becomes constellation rather than line. Characters are built from unrecyclable coffee cups, bottle caps, and forgotten kitchen tools — fragments of utility now reborn as beings of play. They cut, fold, and fasten, assembling garments from the packaging swatches I’ve gathered: foils, receipts, candy wrappers, tea labels, and half-torn cardboard sleeves. In this miniature atelier, every scrap becomes couture. The figures work like couturiers and petites mains — the nimble seamstresses of Parisian fashion houses — their gestures a choreography of stitching, sipping, laughing, and making. Conversation flickers invisibly between them, not through words but through rhythm, texture, and shared invention.
The scene unfolds like a tableau — half workshop, half theatre — where labour and delight are indistinguishable. Their tools clink and hum; scissors become instruments, bottle caps turn into buttons, discarded spoons glint like silver thread. It is a celebration of making, of play as sustenance.
Visually, the drawing draws deeply from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510), whose panoramic world stages the plenitude and folly of human imagination. Like Bosch’s triptych, this upcycled scene reveals a cosmos within a flat plane — a multitude of stories blooming simultaneously, each a metaphor for creation, consumption, and renewal. The composition mirrors his logic of magnification: every detail self-contained yet connected, every gesture echoing a larger system. In this sense, the drawing becomes a microcosm of the world —
a garden of discarded things re-enchanted, a choreography of waste and wonder.
03. THE UPCYCLED MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES
Step inside a museum that hums — not with silence and marble, but with the rustle of receipts and the chatter of spoons.
This speculative museum is built from surplus, populated by creatures of waste and wonder. A stapler sprouts legs, a fork performs as a dancer, a mannequin wears a gown of foil. It echoes the cabinets of curiosity but re-casts them for an age of ecological urgency. Each object is a provocation — asking, What if I could be seen differently? In this museum, delight becomes the first step toward reflection; curiosity becomes the seed of change.
Upcycle Provocation turns waste into Wonder, transforming Everyday Discards into a world of stories, textures, and Play.
It invites us to Reimagine Sustainability not as obligation, but as Imagination itself — to see that every piece of Rubbish carries the Possibility of rebirth, every act of Creativity a Quiet Revolution.