Last year, I completed, defended, and disseminated my practice-based PhD project in illustration, which explored international adoption through a visual, emotional, and personal lens while examining illustration as a mode of artistic research.

In late 2020, I had the opportunity to begin a doctoral programme in artistic research at Konstfack. Artistic research is typically driven by the act of making itself. Rather than studying illustration solely through reading and writing, I developed knowledge by creating, reflecting, and thinking through illustration as an integral part of the research process. (Borgdorff, 2010)

At Konstfack, artistic research does not necessarily culminate in a single written monograph. Instead, doctoral researchers are encouraged to present their work in the form most appropriate to their inquiry. From the outset, it felt important that my project should result in something that actively employed and demonstrated the capacities of illustration, rather than merely describing them.

I kept returning to the communicative aspects of illustration. Illustration rarely exists in isolation. It operates in relation to texts, readers, contexts, and other narratives, shaping how stories are understood and experienced. (Gannon and Fauchon, 2021) Because I wanted to tell a story about transracial adoption and the experience of betweenship, the graphic novel felt particularly well suited to the project. It allowed me to work across multiple layers simultaneously, combining text, image, typography, and design to communicate complex experiences that would have been difficult to convey through words alone. While still uncommon, a small number of researchers, including Nick Sousanis (2014) and Kay Sohini (2022), had already demonstrated the potential of the graphic novel as a dissertation format. 

Illustration can clarify, define, and make visible, it can also sustain ambiguity, hold contradictions, and move between multiple perspectives. As I was painting my cultural betweenship containing valuable resources as well as melancholy and loss, I was carving out that home between homes. “Home has proven to be both a place of confinement and an inexhaustible reservoir from which one can expand” (Trinh T, 2011)

Through an autoethnographic approach, the project combines personal experience with analyses of race, class, and international adoption as a system shaped by colonial and economic interests. (Hübinette, 2006) It explores processes of assimilation, the loss of Korean identity, mental health issues, and the challenges of communication between adoptees and their first families. I was interested in how the graphic novel format could communicate complex and emotionally charged experiences while connecting them to the broader historical and social structures that sustain the international adoption industry. (Chute, 2010)

While adoption forms the narrative foundation of the work, illustration remained the primary field of inquiry, with a particular focus on the relationship between text and image and the values and associations attached to particular styles and visual traditions. I wanted the graphic novel to be responsible for addressing my research questions:

I started by researching the images that had shaped my own working-class upbringing: decorations, kitsch, folk art, ornaments, and illustrations celebrating nature, colour, craftsmanship, the pretty, and the romantic. I kept returning to visual forms that have historically been gendered and assigned low cultural value because of their associations with femininity, the domestic sphere, and the working class. (Norman, 1990) Rather than treating these visual traditions as peripheral or merely decorative, I became interested in what they might reveal about taste, power, class, and cultural legitimacy, and how they could function as vehicles for critique.

Particularly within a Swedish graphic novel context, I became interested in what I perceived as an association between political and adult narratives and a raw, punk-inflected black-and-white minimalism. (Teleman and Berg, 2013) By comparison, colour, ornament, and decorative aesthetics are often read as sentimental or child-oriented, making them less common choices for addressing politically charged subjects. I wanted to work against that distinction, drawing on a longer history in which ornament, decoration, and color have frequently been positioned as inferior within gendered, racialised, and colonial hierarchies of value. (Batchelor, 2000) This project negotiates how aesthetic conventions shape perceptions of authority, legitimacy, and cultural value, and how the “cute” and the “pretty” can become rebellious replies. (Ngai, 2022)

I wanted to place illustration at the centre of the project, trusting images to communicate ideas, emotions, and experiences while giving readers the time and space to interpret, dwell in, and feel their way through them. Symbols, visual cues, and recurring motifs are used to build layers of meaning, allowing different cultural references and associations to resonate against one another. Inspired by the work of artists such as Shaun Tan (2014) and Nora Krug (2019), my project deliberately moves beyond conventional comics grids and speech bubbles, expanding the graphic novel page as a space for experimentation.

What role does writing play in artistic research? Must we write at all? 

Throughout my doctoral studies, I often encountered seminars and defences where attention seemed to gravitate towards the written component, as if the artistic work were somehow secondary. At first, I was convinced that my project should consist solely of the graphic novel. Given the historical tension and gendering between text and image, and academia’s tendency to privilege text as the primary site of knowledge, I saw the exclusion of a written component as a challenge to the belief that writing is necessary to legitimise artistic knowledge.

However, if the aim is to expand what is recognised as knowledge production and to move beyond binary oppositions, eliminating text does not in itself challenge the structural hierarchies that organise form and legitimacy. It’s just a withdrawal. A more generative challenge may lie in demonstrating how artistic work can engage with text differently: not as an explanatory apparatus that authorises the visual, but as a mode of thinking that operates in dialogue with it. This raises questions not only about the relationship between image and text, but also about what kinds of writing are permitted to participate in research in the first place.

I also wanted the project to be pedagogical and accessible. While I believe the graphic novel can address my research inquiry through its own visual language, understanding it as a PhD dissertation and research project still requires a high level of visual, cultural, and academic literacy. This made me question who I wanted to write for. If I adopted a purely academic voice, who would be able to access the work? Who did I want to invite into the conversation?

For me, one of the promises of artistic research lies in the possibility of sharing knowledge in varied ways. Different research questions call for different forms, voices, and methods of communication. A single format cannot accommodate every project, nor should it. If artistic research is to expand how knowledge is produced, it should also expand how it is shared.

There was an opportunity for me to craft a thesis that deviated from the traditional academic format. Within illustration, there is an enormous body of knowledge about how to make information or narratives accessible to varied kinds of audiences, how image and text collaborate, how images are read, and how they operate within their contexts. I looked at these strategies while writing The Companion, asking how an illustrator might approach writing if the form of the text were allowed to emerge from the needs of the project rather than from disciplinary convention. I began to imagine the companion as a textual counterpart: a reader, a guide, a friend of sorts. The result was a form of writing that aimed to be accessible, personal, reflective, and emotionally engaged, while still communicating knowledge and research, much inspired by Avery F. Gordon’s (2008) way of writing about social ghosts and hauntings.

The Companion takes responsibility for certain academic conventions, such as references, sources, statistics, and contextual information. More importantly, however, it functions as a form of pedagogical reader support. It helps make visible how the illustrations were constructed, how theory and method are woven into the graphic novel, and how the project was developed through artistic practice. In this sense, it serves as a voluntary guide or a glimpse behind the scenes of the research process.

The Companion brings together different modes of writing, ranging from essayistic reflections and historical overviews to diary entries and a love letter. Some sections are brief and light, while others engage in greater depth. Together, the graphic novel and The Companion offer readers different pathways through the project, inviting them to move between the two books and engage with the work on their own terms.

By adopting a more commercial, inviting, and educational format, the project seeks to make academic knowledge approachable to those who might not otherwise engage with a traditional textual thesis. I imagined a reader who didn’t necessarily have an academic education, and I wanted the language, layout and design of the publication to also take this into consideration by using the margins to explain words, terminology and concepts which may not be obvious outside of academia.

Graphic designer and illustrator Alexandra Falagara was asked to do the graphic design on the Swedish version of The Companion. Together, we discussed the visual values addressed in the graphic novel and how they should also be reflected in The Companion, so that it should be inviting, decorated, colourful, and convey readability and accessibility. We tried to keep the layout organised and neat, yet warm and easy to navigate. The ornaments throughout the pages are a mix of traditional Chinese corner motifs, also used in Korean culture, and cross-stitches inspired by simple embroidery. It should feel like a gentle and kind guide rather than something heavy and challenging.

The mid-section was inspired by a glossary and is called What’s in the page.
It opens up a selection of illustrations in the graphic novel and talks about how they were crafted, the inspiration behind, the social or historical context, or the symbolism embedded.

I do believe that my thesis communicates in ways that are true to who I am and where I come from. I think it is a project that illustration students can pick up, understand, and engage with, and that it might encourage them to think, "I could also do research through illustration!"

The thesis was printed in a limited edition and distributed primarily to visual communication institutions, but the full project is available digitally on my website. It includes the graphic novel, written in English and The Companion, a reading guide available in both Swedish and English. I am hoping the thesis will find a commercial publisher in the future.

Cecilia is located in Stockholm, Sweden and is currently preparing a postdoc project about how racialised power relations, colonial legacies, and visual culture shape interracial romantic relationships between East and Southeast Asian women and white men.