LONELINESS AMONG
MIGRANTS IN LONDON

At some point last year, whilst on the tube, I found an article in a discarded copy of The Economist about loneliness in London. This article indicated that Britain is the ‘loneliness capital of Europe’. In fact, London struck me as a lonely city when I started my new life here one and a half years ago. As an international student, I was very excited about trying new things at the beginning of term; all the while, I felt quite frustrated with language barriers and cultural differences, which hindered my access to information and ability to communicate with my class as well as in daily life. According to research by the British charity The Forum, loneliness is also one of the toughest challenges facing migrants in London.

Using this zine, I wanted to illustrate the problems with loneliness in London, through a combination of informative statistics and interviews conducted with migrants in the city. How does loneliness affect us in our day to day lives, and what can we learn from it?

初來乍到倫敦唸書，除了興奮之情外，跟許多留學生一樣面臨到了語言與文化上的差異與隔閡，這樣的親身經歷讓我開始在學校研究移居者（Migrants）在倫敦的寂寞，希望藉由這本雜誌裡的數據與訪談內容，能刻劃出寂寞在這座城市裡的社會問題。寂寞是如何影響我們的日常生活？以及我們能如何學習與寂寞共處？

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Risograph Zine, 297 x 420mm, 12 pages, 2020
Work In Progress Show 2020, Royal College of Art, London, 2020

Illustration:
Loneliness is a subjective feeling and is hard to describe in words. Taking this into consideration, I asked all the interviewees to try and express their feelings of loneliness visually through a pencil sketch. These sketches formed the basis of my own illustrations in which I sought to empathise with my interviewees, and through geometric abstraction find a commonality between our experiences.

BY CHEN DESIGN