Structure & Morphplogy — Lost and NOT Found

This project started with a feeling — one I couldn’t name at first. After watching Late Autumn (2010), I wasn’t left with a plot or a character arc, but with a sense of something unspoken hanging in the air. The film is quiet, restrained, and emotionally heavy in a way that doesn’t scream for attention.

That’s what inspired Lost and Not Found, a graphic design project that documents the emotional weight of things that aren’t meant to be souvenirs. The watch Hoon gives Anna. The fork from the confrontation with Wang Jing. A cup of coffee sitting on a table at a bus station, growing cold. None of these objects are remarkable on their own — but in the context of the film, they carry the traces of people who couldn’t say what they felt, and moments that couldn’t last. They’re quiet stand-ins for memory, longing, and unresolved emotion.

Visually, this project is made entirely of illustrations — no photographs. I didn’t want to replicate what the film had already shown; instead, I wanted to translate the emotional residue of the objects into a new visual language. The illustrations are restrained, quiet, often minimal — sometimes almost too simple — but that was the point. These weren’t meant to be literal renderings. They were meant to feel like memory sketches — blurred around the edges, incomplete, fading slightly with time.

Spreads of Part 2 Booklet

Part 1 of this project is a small poster that mimics a real lost-and-found notice — but instead of inviting people to claim something, it asks them to sit with the feeling. Part 2 & 3 are small booklets that gives the stories and dialogues behind these objects, providing a complementary description of the poster. The books are structured around each object, pairing it with dialogue fragments, visual reinterpretations, and written reflections. But the tone is intentionally minimal. There’s no dramatic storytelling, no resolution — just moments, suspended in layout, like how memory really works.

I also worked with Ziyu Wang and Haoteng Zhu, who were exploring We Made a Beautiful Bouquet and In the Mood for Love — films that, like Late Autumn, reflect East Asian values around love, restraint, and impermanence. Together, we built a shared language around stillness, melancholy, and emotional distance. We made a G-fold zine as an introductory part of our projects and it also binds the concept of our films together.

Three of Our Projects Displayed Together

What I learned in making this project is that design doesn’t always need to resolve. It doesn’t need to explain everything. Sometimes, it just needs to hold space for a story that couldn’t finish — and that’s okay. Lost and Not Found isn’t a conclusion. It’s a gesture. A reminder that even in the most fleeting, unspoken moments, something real can be left behind.