At the centre of Steffie Yee’s work is wonder – the kind that makes you reconsider what escapes attention when it should demand it. It’s what connects her craft across boundaries and mediums. An animator and illustrator with clients like PinkPantheress and Sam Smith in her portfolio, her unmistakable visual language awakens curiosity.

Living on Wurundjeri Country, Naarm (Melbourne), Steffie was born in Australia to Malaysian Chinese parents. Her creativity pays reverence to that heritage – the language, mannerisms, food, smells and spaces she grew up around. Rather than treating diaspora as something abstract, she approaches it through lived memory and sensory detail.

This is perhaps most evident in her solo exhibition Chinese Restaurant Playground – a project paying homage to the memories of her family’s Chinese restaurant in regional New South Wales. Through animation, illustration and installation, the work humanises the people behind these restaurants, whose stories are often overlooked within broader Australian cultural narratives.

Such is the importance of creatives like Steffie, bridging the disparity between what we see and what is lived. But her work doesn’t preach. Instead, through imaginative, playful and almost frenetic energy, it platforms joy and vividness within spaces too often ignored.