Earbugz Collective
Calgary, Canada
Earbugz is Michelle Ku + Wenting Li, two muralists and artists based between Calgary/Mohkinstsis and Tkaronto/ Toronto. With family roots in Hong Kong, Michelle maintains a 2D animation practice while also making paintings, sculpture, and murals. Born in Sichuan, China, Wenting splits time between murals, print + digital publication, installation, community arts programming, and comics.
Together, our work and murals are playful, with stylized shapes, recurring characters, and bold colours that convey mood and amplify narrative. We are influenced by childhood memories, our shared Chinese cultural identity, and examining and reimagining the world around us. Offering our unique visual take on the world around us, we make murals as a conduit for storytelling and contemporary myth-making.
Mural Title
“Meeting Space ”
Mural Statement
Our mural is set in a magical energy portal space where characters from different universes visit and cross paths. Both an interior and exterior space, it shows how each of our different life paths and interior worlds cross and connect, creating a collective third space. In this way, our mural offers a visual metaphor for a place of connection, sharing, & coming together in community.
The two characters featured in the design are explorers and wanderers, searching for new experiences and points of views as they traverse through the portals. From the windows, we get the suggestion of different worlds outside our own present reality. However, all these different spaces remain connected through a ribbon of energy which runs through and between windows/ portals, reminding us how our experiences are interconnected with others across space and time. Each portal is a different colour to represent a different universe, and as the energy ribbon weaves through the portals, its colour is also changed by the world it enters.
As this is our first mural as a collective, it’s fitting that we are depicting two worlds meeting. It feels like that through collaborating, we are taking elements from each of our visual universes and building a new space where we can meet each other and create art in common.