Presenting the kick ass class of Young Guns 22
It’s a kick-ass class. Young Guns 22 is topping the charts in creativity. But are you even surprised? Of course, not. If you’re new here, let me catch you up. Young Guns is a community of incredibly talented individuals – think amazing cinematographers, animators, illustrators, photographers, designers, and directors – and a new class of winners is chosen by an expert jury every year. This year we have 33 winners and among them, we have some very new, very exciting titles to unveil – an Architectural Designer, Composer, Stage & Show Designer, and Colorist.
We interviewed the winners so we could share their prowess with you. And if you’re a NYC local you can snag a ticket to the official YG22 Party at Sony Hall on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, where you will have the chance to meet and greet them.
Young Guns continue to dominate the creative industry, so we’re happily presenting you with the kick-ass class of Young Guns 22.
Grace Chuang
Creative Director & Biocreative
Based:
Austin, Texas
Hometown:
Great Falls, Virginia
What were your original impressions of the Young Guns competition, award, and community?
Coming from a non-creative education and background, I had never heard of Young Guns, nor had anyone ever told me about it. But in 2022 I was exploring creative competitions to enter and ended up winning cubes in ADC, which led me to other awards through The One Club for Creativity. From there on it was on my bucket list to be a finalist for Young Guns, but I never thought it was possible to be a winner! I still feel like I’m dreaming now.
How did you end up in the creative field anyways?
My story is completely different from probably anyone who has ever won Young Guns before. I didn’t study design or fine arts — I got a degree in Chemical Engineering. I’ve always had an eye for design and creative mediums, but I was 100% sure I was going to be a scientist or engineer.
In college I spent my days growing mammalian cells for experiments and studying complicated things like thermodynamics (please don’t ask me to explain what that is though). But halfway through my degree I started to feel discontent. I wondered if there was more to life outside of the lab, if there was a way to tell stories about science using empathy and creativity. I wanted to think about why we were building technologies, and who we were building them for. I realized these were not just technical questions, but questions of design. I began to explore creative outlets as a way to bridge the microscopic world to society – teaching myself photography and graphic design, working at a film agency for a summer, producing an art exhibition on campus, and joining a studio full of architects as the resident biologist, where we were developing self-folding structures inspired by nature. I was fascinated by the intersection of art and science, driven by the idea that we could work across disciplines to imagine and create better futures. However, I was repeatedly told I could only be one or the other. A creative or a biologist, a designer or an engineer, but never both.
My determination to forego the status quo and break down boundaries led me to where I am today. I landed a job on the creative team at a biotech startup working under a well-known bioartist and creative mastermind Christina Agapakis. In those early years the world was our oyster – we resurrected the scents of extinct flowers with biotechnology that were smelled around the world in every leading art exhibition, ran a residency for designers to work in the lab, and organized design hackathons with scientists to brainstorm possible futures. I co-founded a magazine, learned how to creative and art direct simply through practice (and won a ton of awards for it), and led the company’s brand through a $15B IPO. Most importantly, I found an entire creative community of weirdo, misfit, passionate people who were all using interdisciplinarity to challenge and change how science was done. I was hooked.
From what we know, I might be the first winner in the history of Young Guns who not only has no formal education in anything creative, but a science degree. So I’m just ecstatic to be a trailblazer here, showing not only that interdisciplinary creatives exist, but also we can lead the field in our work. I’m incredibly grateful for everyone who played a part in my journey getting here.
Congrats on the YG win! Why did you decide to enter this year?
In 2022, I left my job to start my own business for creative direction at the intersection of tech, biology, and design. When I went freelance, I began working with a wide variety of clients in tech, VC, and academia, which grew my portfolio quickly. My work became more curated, and it started to feel like you could tell when a project had been creative directed by me. That’s when I decided I was ready to enter.
This was my first time entering, which is just mindblowing to me! At the beginning of July I met Oen Hammonds, a design executive at IBM, who kindly looked over my application. I told him I didn’t expect to get it, but the process of curating a portfolio to six projects seemed like a useful thing to go through. When he took a look at my entry, he told me he had never seen anything like my work before. There aren’t many people in the world who do what I do at my caliber, so I was hoping it would stand out. I guess it worked!
You only get to submit six projects that embody you and your talent. So, how did you decide which pieces were good enough to make the cut?
I’m a creative director who has worked across every medium imaginable — print, digital, photo, video, experiential, so I curated my projects to show the breadth and depth of what I can do. I’ve also been told my ability to create vision and mobilize creative teams to execute is unmatched, and I wanted each of my entries to show that clearly. Nearly every single one of the projects I submitted is work that I concepted the creative brief for, strategized, and brought to life from nothing. Even when there was a client, I was never instructed exactly what to do and had a lot of free reign to make my own creative decisions. I didn’t want to show anything where I had a supporting role, so I chose work that felt like mine. The Young Guns deadline also pushed me to launch a dream project of mine that I had been concocting up for months! I created the Biocreative Index, a directory of people working at the intersection of biology and creative disciplines. I knew I wanted it as one of my six projects to show something personal, so I hustled to finish and launch it before the application closed.
What was your reaction when you discovered that you won?
I had just gotten off of a video call with Christina Agapakis, my former boss and mentor, scheming ideas for our next creative projects. So many people who work in my space have credited Christina as the reason why biology startups even started caring about brands, and I owe so much of what I do today to the fact that she took a chance on me and hired me onto her creative team when I was 21. I checked my email, screamed and texted her, and then ran down the street to where two of my long-standing best friends live. My best friend had just been named to a Hispanic 30 under 30 list that same week, so we were both jumping up and down with joy. It was so special that the first people I got to share the news with were people who have known me for years and championed me from the beginning.
How does your current home inspire your creativity as an artist?
When you think of Austin, you don’t think of it as a creative hub for arts and media the way you think about New York or Los Angeles. But every day I am inspired here because of the community. I never thought in a place like Texas I would make friends from all around the world – Iran, Afghanistan, China, Japan, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Turkey, Columbia, and more. The jobs we all do are very different and sometimes we don’t even speak the same language. What it means though is that I’m never in a place where I only talk to designers, or people in tech, or people from the same economic or ethnic backgrounds. Austin represents a city that embraces my passion for creating spaces for people who don’t quite fit in, whether I am cooking food in my home for strangers, befriending asylum seekers and international students, or connecting creatives across disciplines. It’s a place where I can take my creative work that fulfills me and use that energy to serve others, which then invigorates me to create more purposeful work.
Now that you’re a part of the Young Guns community, are there any past winners you look up to and admire?
I’m a big fan of The Daniels (YG14). As a Taiwanese-American who has experienced the struggle of living between cultures and growing up as a child of immigrants, I have never felt so seen as when I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once. I laughed, I cried, I watched every awards show speech (and cried again), celebrating that I could see someone who looked like me making history.
When reflecting on their success, Daniel Kwan wrote something on his Instagram that said “[Before] any of the awards buzz began, we were already overfilled, oversaturated, and just grateful. It was already more than enough… You can ask anyone who worked on the film, we never thought of this film as an awards contender. We were merely making a movie we wished existed, hoping there would be a few others who felt the same way.”
That’s how I feel about my work. I never made any of this to win awards or to gain recognition, but because I wanted to create work I wished existed in the world. Every email I’ve gotten from someone who feels inspired by me, every magazine of mine that people have bought, every conversation I’ve had with people who said my work impacted them, that was already more than enough for me.
“I never made any of this to win awards or to gain recognition, but because I wanted to create work I wished existed in the world. Every email I’ve gotten from someone who feels inspired by me, every magazine of mine that people have bought, every conversation I’ve had with people who said my work impacted them, that was already more than enough for me.”
Name a dream project that you have yet to fulfill — maybe Young Guns will propel you in that direction!
I’m super interested in building community and spaces as my next direction. It would be my dream to teach and develop interdisciplinary curriculum at both fine arts and STEM universities and to curate landmark art/science exhibitions and programming, like this. And one day, I want to open a physical coffee shop/bookstore/gathering space in NYC, LA, or Austin selling bio-inspired home decor and books! Mushroom lamps, glow in the dark plants, vintage botanical posters, clothing printed with ink from algae, all the science-tech-society books, you name it. I want to use the space to host workshops on growing knickknacks out of mycelium, arranging ikebana, learning the art of fermenting foods, and curate thought provoking panels where people of different disciplines are in conversation with each other.
Will we see you at the YG22 party in NYC in November?
I wouldn’t miss it for the world!
Come party with us and celebrate the class of Young Guns 22 on Wednesday, November 13, 6:30 PM, at Sony Hall in NYC!
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