Wild & Bright: Designing for Belonging | Artist Talk with Yiying Lu, in Conversation with Thomas S. Mullaney

What can a whale, a dumpling, and an endangered clouded leopard tell us about belonging?

Join artist and designer Yiying Lu, creator of Twitter’s Fail Whale and six emoji adopted into the Unicode Standard, for an opening talk celebrating Wild & Bright, an exhibition of nine large-scale digital paintings from her multi-year series on endangered species, on view in Hohbach Hall at Green Library through 2028.

Lu will trace the unexpected creative path connecting these seemingly different worlds: from a personal illustration that became Twitter’s Fail Whale in 2008, to emoji designed to expand the world’s shared visual vocabulary, to a red panda created for a Bay Area AAPI night market that opened an entirely new direction in her practice.

That exploration eventually led Lu to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, where her logo design for COP15 received an Award of Honor, and to support from the Adobe Creative Residency Community Fund. Wild & Bright began on August 4, 2020, International Clouded Leopard Day, with the clouded leopard as the first animal in the series.

The work has since returned to the community in new ways. In 2025, sixteen pieces from the series were featured at a San Francisco Zoo fundraising gala, bringing art, storytelling, and wildlife conservation together.

Across Lu’s work runs a central question:

What does it take to make someone, or something, feel like it belongs in the picture?

She approaches belonging as a design inquiry: whether the subject is a species losing its natural habitat, a culture missing from a global visual language, or a whale that made failure feel unexpectedly human.

Following the presentation, Lu will join Professor Thomas S. Mullaney for a conversation about language, technology, and how visual systems decide who becomes visible. The program will conclude with an audience Q&A.

The event takes place in the lead-up to World Animal Day on October 4.

About Yiying Lu

Yiying Lu is an award-winning artist, designer, and creative leader working at the intersection of art, technology, culture, and human experience. For nearly two decades, her practice has moved across digital culture, brand systems, public art, creative technology, and civic life, translating complex ideas into visual experiences that connect across cultures and communities.

She is the creator of Twitter’s Fail Whale and has designed and successfully proposed six emoji adopted into the Unicode Standard, including the dumpling and boba tea. She previously served as Global Creative Director at 500 Global and as a San Francisco Arts Commissioner, appointed by the Mayor of San Francisco. She currently leads Happy Creative Land, a San Francisco-based innovation studio, and serves as an Adobe Global Creative Ambassador and a committee member of the UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford.

Her creative collaborations have included Disney, Apple, Google, Airbnb, Adobe, and NYU Shanghai. She has spoken at SXSW, Web Summit, TEDx, Today at Apple, and Talks at Google, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TIME, The Atlantic, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal.

Lu has been recognized by Fast Company as one of its Most Creative People in Business, by Microsoft as a Top 10 Leader in Innovation, and by the Shorty Awards as its inaugural winner in Design.

Born in Shanghai, educated in Sydney and London, and based in San Francisco, Lu brings a lived global perspective to the ways design and storytelling can create connections across cultures, communities, and generations.

About Thomas Mullaney 

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow. 

He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.

His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.