A young Malaysian illustrator in the garden of freelancing in Romania.

The little ink bottle should have stayed at home, in Bucharest, but instead, it is now flying to Paris, in the plane’s luggage compartment, zip locked in a plastic bag. Its owner, Tuan Nini, a 26-year-old illustrator, has been commissioned a project at the last moment, just before her 10-days trip to Paris. She couldn’t say no, the project was really nice, so next to some clothes and a map of Paris, she packed some brushes, some paper, a pencil and a putty eraser.

For most for us, an ink bottle seems an object as obsolete as the tape recorders, an item which we may have used a thousand years ago, back in school. But Nini uses it to draw strange sea creatures, or places she comes across.

Now, sitting in her rented apartment in Montparnasse, she’s using the ink technique for the commissioned project - she has to draw some buildings on Calea Victoriei in Bucharest. She’s looking up Google Maps, using the Street View as reference. “So there I was in Paris, and I am looking at Bucharest. Silly!”

“The good thing about freelancing is that you can work anywhere you want,” she says. “The bad thing about freelancing is...you can work anywhere you need to.”

When she moved from Malaysia to Romania, Nini was only 19 and used to have long hair, but now, seven years later, she wears her hair cut short in a cap shape. A friend of hers commented on a recent Facebook photo of her, “you look so grown up and cosmopolitan, Nini”, and she answered “Aha really? I think I look like this” and she posted a picture of a cat wearing a cap. “Coming to a different land...I didn’t make such a big deal at the time. Now, looking back, I can say, wow, I had some balls, or I was really stupid..yeah..I was always a mixture of these things,” she says laughing. She’s honest and very witty, and even if she has big, curious eyes, just like a kid, she’s quite down-to-earth.

As soon as I’ve seen some of her commissioned drawings, I got in touch with Tuan Nini. Illustration has been getting a bigger role in the advertising industry in Romania, and Tuan Nini is among these young illustrators who bring a breath of fresh air into the advertising landscape.

She was a bit reluctant at first to share her story. “I'm not a very good talker but I think I can give it a try with an interview.” So in the end we met and we sat for a talk. She ordered a beer, and it was obvious right from the beginning that she was the opposite of a ‘not very good talker’. She’s very articulate, quite self-confident, and totally friendly.

She quit smoking about two years ago, and it coincided with a time when she started to take things more seriously professionally. “I think the stars were aligning.” She had graduated from the Fine Arts University in Bucharest, and was still very uncertain about what work she could do. As a young artist and student, she had this dream she would do paintings and sell them with loads of money, but slowly she understood that the world of gallery exhibitions is not her thing. “With the contemporary art world, you need to have so much confidence in yourself. I simply can’t do the whole ‘yeah...I’m totally better than the whole world, I’m so eccentric, my work is awesome, you can’t understand it, that’s why is good.”

She started freelancing illustration in 2012, but it didn’t really pick up until this year. “I think last year I was still having a lot of free weeks, like not having to do something every week. It’s only this year that people started calling me more often.”

Working on a commissioned project is of course different than working on your own project. “It’s a lot of give and take and I think I’m always like...should I have my own voice, or should I give away? But I decided at some point that I should do drawings that contribute to people’s needs, so if this company needs this kind of drawing, then I will offer my service, rather than offer my art. I see it like that.”

“In the end it’s a job. You’re part of the society, if they give something to you, which is the ability to pay your bills, the ability to pay your beers, to live and eventually get even a car or something, then you should give something back. I don’t know, it’s just a work ethics, I guess”.

She started drawing when she was really young- she was asthmatic and her parents wouldn’t let her go anywhere. So she spent a lot of time at home, reading Japanese comics. “I still remember I was already 9 when I was reading my Sailor Moon and I was so amazed, ‘God, they are so beautiful’. I really believed that they were somehow magically made by computer. How could anybody draw that beautifully?”

“When I find out that they were actually drawn that’s when my mind got blown away about what you could draw, what could come out. It’s when I really started drawing a lot.”

Although it’s true that the joy of drawing as a kid is different from her joy of drawing now, she says. “Now I’m a lot more self-conscious, is it good enough? When you are a kid, you don’t care about what defines you, but now you have this imaginary audience who is waiting for stuff from you and it’s a pressure. I think every artist goes through this and then you probably have an epiphany and you just say: f..k the world! And you just draw.”

But of course, there is a paradox in all this pressure. “Right now it’s the only way to push myself to do things, because if I don’t feel I’m stressed I’d be ok with where I am and then I won’t work and try to get better. I need a sense of urgency a little bit.”

“Honestly I’m probably having like a crisis, or something because I’ve always felt like my life should be coming, but recently I’ve felt like it’s now or never. So f...ing do something about it. You can’t wait for your life to happen, go and do it, and I feel like I’m ready.”

What about her room, I ask her, how does it look like? “Oh...it’s not super artistic. I know those posts on the internet with artist studios, magnificent, huge, with sunlight everywhere. No, no! My apartment is really, really small, tiny, tiny and I just have a table, next to the window.” She laughs and then she adds. “You see the houses nearby, it’s not like you have the overview of Manhattan. Nothing like that. It’s just a living room, a lot of books around.”

She’s now working on a graphic novel with a writer from Malaysia. “I really like the stuff that she’s writing and I’m actually thinking, oh, can I bring the stuff that she’s writing to life?

It’s actually a superhero comic, about a post oil era in Malaysia. “The country still lives from oil, we subsidize everything and we don’t try to diversify. We are trying to go to the service sector but still most of the money come from oil. So she made this story about how KL would be like…”
KL? I ask her. What’s that?

“Yeah, we call Kuala Lumpur, KL. We do that for everything. We call a lot of towns just dj or pj.”
Then she continues: “I think it’s also good for me to work with somebody because it’s so lonely freelancing. You do meet a lot of people and you’re not stuck in one office, but at the same time you don’t bond with those people, just a few emails and you don’t see them again.”

She thought as well about renting a studio and inviting some friends to work together, but I don’t have many friends, she adds laughing. “In the meantime I just got so comfortable from working at home, getting up from bed and just jumping to the computer. When I take a break I can start baking bread. And recently I just bought myself a piano and I can just go there.”

In the near future, she’d like to get an illustration agency to enroll her as their full time illustration artist so they can get her all paper work. But agencies search for specialized illustrators, and Tuan Nini says she’s still doing so many things, trying this and trying that. “You need to specialize and it’s a shame. Because I want to do everything. It’s like in primary school when you learn that you have to cut some buds off the rose to make one bigger rose. And then you are like buds..but these are so nice...they could be something too.”

Did you learn that in primary school, I ask her?

“It was like a living skills subject. We learned some garden stuff and what order you should do dishes, also some accounting stuff.”

“That’s strange.”

“Yeah, but you have Latin. That’s strange,” she says laughing.

The last time she went back home to Malaysia was in December. Kuala Lumpur suddenly looked different to her. She was in awe with things she had seen thousands of times before, like the Twin Towers, but she was somehow seeing them for the first time. “Then I saw this banner with ‘Tesco, home delivery’ and I was like, that’s it, I am moving back. It was so stupid, so capitalistic, superficial and nothing deep at all, but I was like: man, things work back home.”

“I think I’m always in a consideration of whether I should come back. I definitely didn't make up my mind to stay here forever. I don’t think it’s my last destination. I’d like to see more of the world. I still hold some of the 19-year-old in me. I hope. In the meantime of course I got comfortable here, but hopefully I will get the courage again.”

By Diana Mesesan, features writer, diana@romania-insider.com

(opening photo by Diana Mesesan, illustrations by Tuan Nini)