The whittling-wooden Sculptures of Clucludie Creatures, courtesy of the artist
People who have seen Clucludie Creatures are often struck by the level of wonder and whimsy filled in these hand-sized objects. A tiny frog peeks behind a rock. A small aquatic creature emerges from the twinning of yarns. A tufted crocodile playfully lays next to its friends. A school of fish shoaling and darting around. They feel familiar yet impossible to place, as though they have wandered into our reality from somewhere just beyond it.
Behind these curious beings and the convoluted world is multimedia artist Mingyin Qi – founder of Clucludie Creatures, a design studio, a craft store, a creative IP, and an evolving universe that spans disciplines including illustration, sculpture, fiber arts, woodworking, paper engineering, and design. Based in New York and New Jersey, Qi has spent the past years building a world that moves across materials and formats, taking on new forms while maintaining a distinct visual identity.
What makes Clucludie Creatures particularly compelling is that they feel alive, both in the presentation and the production. Qi makes them alive. A creature may begin as a drawing, grow fuller into a needle-felted sculpture, reappear as a tufted textile work, and later become a part of a larger installation. Each version reveals something new about its personality while contributing to the abundant world of Clucludie. For Qi, making can be understood as following the life of an idea as it evolves.
From Illustration to Object
The drawing of Clucludie Creatures, courtesy of the artist
Qi’s practice begins with drawing. Trained as an illustrator at Parsons School of Design, where she graduated in 2025 and received a Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship, she approaches sketching as both observation and world-building. Her drawings introduce the characters that later populate the Clucludie universe, establishing their expressions, proportions, and relationships before they enter physical space.
Yet unlike traditional illustration practices, the drawing is rarely the final destination. Qi’s drawings are starting points for a broader exploration. In this exploration, the characters migrate from paper into fiber, wood, clay, and other materials. In doing so, they acquire weight, texture, and presence. A line becomes a silhouette; a silhouette becomes a body.
The transition reflects a practice that sits at the intersection of art, craft, and design. While contemporary art often prioritizes concept and design frequently emphasizes function, Qi’s work occupies a space where narrative, materiality, and making remain equally important. Her creatures are designed, but they are also crafted. They carry visible traces of the hand that made them.
Installed View of Clucludie Creatures’ booth, courtesy of the artist
Craft as a Language
Many artists become known for one signature medium. Qi’s practice is notable for the opposite reason.
Her work incorporates diverse mediums including woodworking, printmaking, tufting, needle felting, textile dyeing, paper engineering, clay, and more innovative mixed-media construction. Rather than treating these disciplines as separate specialties, she approaches them as different dialects within an astonishingly consistent visual language.
At art fairs and exhibitions, it is often immediately obvious which booth belongs to the worlds of Clucludie. One may easily be drawn first by the vividness of the scenes: miniature worlds crowded with strange beings with eyes staring up at you, oversized leaves, mushrooms, clouds, and architecture fragments. Yet what becomes increasingly remarkable upon closer inspection is the consistency across materials. A tufted surface, a carved wooden form, a felted figure, and a printed illustration all appear to originate from the same universe. Each medium retains its own physical character while remaining unmistakably part of the larger Clucludie ecosystem.
This consistency reveals a level of craft that extends beyond technical proficiency. Qi is not simply mastering multiple materials; she is practicing with a coherent visual language across them. The result is a body of work that feels less like a collection of objects and more like an expanding world, one in which every new material becomes another way for a Clucludie creature to inhabit physical space.
This quality was particularly evident in Qi’s solo exhibition at Aspace, a community art gallery in Bushwick. In the show, all standalone objects created by Qi are shown as inhabitants of a shared environment. Moving through the exhibition is entering a Clucludie habitat, where differences in material and scale gave the impression of distinct species and landscapes. Both Qi’s booth and the solo exhibition demonstrated how Qi’s craft operates not only at the level of making objects, but also at the level of worldbuilding—using materials as tools for constructing a coherent fictional ecology.
Installed View of Clucludie Creatures’ show in Aspace Gallery, courtesy of the artist
Design Beyond Function
While Clucludie Creatures often resemble collectible toys, they resist the conventional boundaries of product design.
In some ways, Qi’s object design borrows from traditions of toy design, illustration, craft objects, and contemporary sculpture, yet they are not fully contained by any of these categories. Instead, they operate as narrative objects—works whose value lies beyond itself but in the worlds they suggest. This approach has allowed the project to grow in both artistic and commercial contexts. Through her independent practice and shop, Qi has developed a growing audience who engage with the creatures not merely as products but as extensions of a larger fictional universe.
Rather than separating art from design, the Clucludie project demonstrates how the two can enrich one another. Design provides accessibility and connection; art provides imagination and openness. Together, the two endeavors of Qi create a world that invites both emotional attachment and curiosity.
Life Beyond the Studio
The many lives of a Clucludie Creature continue long after it leaves the studio.
Over the past several years, Qi has exhibited and presented her work through an extensive network of fairs, festivals, and community-driven events across New York, including Renegade Craft Fair, MoCCA Fest, FAD Market, Society of Illustrators Holiday Fair, Queens Craft Brigade, Niji Market, Sunnyday Market, Fanfaire NYC, and numerous independent artist markets.
These spaces have become an important part of Qi’s career development. Unlike traditional gallery settings, markets allow visitors to encounter the work directly, often forming immediate and personal relationships with the creatures. A sculpture becomes a gift. A character finds a new home. A brief interaction inspires a lasting connection.
Recent projects have also expanded the scale of the Clucludie universe. For the Lower East Side Yearbook exhibition, Qi created a large-scale pop-up book installation that wove together neighborhood history and fictional storytelling. Drawing from local architecture, community memory, and the changing landscape of the Lower East Side, the work imagined Clucludie creatures inhabiting and reshaping familiar urban spaces. The project demonstrated a growing ambition within Qi’s practice – using the unique craft as a language to build worlds where fantasy and lived history can coexist.
LES Yearbook: A Living Archive at Abrons Art Center, courtesy of the artist
The Many Lives of a Creature
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Clucludie Creatures is their refusal to remain fixed.
A drawing becomes a sculpture. A sculpture becomes a collectible object. An object becomes part of an installation. Each transformation opens new possibilities for how a character can exist and how audiences can encounter it.
This continual movement reflects the spirit of Mingyin Qi’s practice itself. Rooted in illustration but expanded through craft and design, her work embraces transformation as both a method and a philosophy. The creatures may appear whimsical, but beneath their playful surfaces lies a serious commitment to material exploration, storytelling, and the belief that ideas, like living things, can continue evolving long after they are first imagined.
In the world of Clucludie Creatures, every character has many lives. So does Qi and every medium she endeavors.
About Writer
Shuang Cai is a writer, curator. and multimedia artist. Their art practices focus on logic, interactions, and humor. Their curatorial works aim to bring forth the power of interconnectedness and diverse voices across communities. They hold a Bachelor’s degree from Bard College, majoring in Computer Science joint Studio Art, and a Master’s from New York University Interactive Telecommunication Program(ITP). Currently, they are getting their PhD in Human Computer Interaction at Cornell University and actively curating in New York City. They were an ITP research resident, the curatorial fellow at NARS.
