Some art whispers. Some art shouts. Some art quietly rearranges the furniture in your brain and leaves before you notice the sofa is now on the ceiling.
The 2023 London International Creative Competition, commonly known as LICC, offered plenty of all three. Its international selections crossed painting, illustration, photography, digital art, mixed media, installation, architecture, and design. Rather than rewarding one safe visual style, the competition created room for artists who experiment with unfamiliar materials, personal memories, political realities, technology, and the occasional object that looks as though it arrived from a neighboring dimension.
After reviewing the featured works, artist statements, creative methods, and emotional impact of the entries, I selected 10 pieces that best represent the restless spirit of the competition. This is an editorial ranking rather than the official LICC podium. In fact, the official Best in CREATE awards went to Residual Darkness by Dina Abdoos in the professional division and Between Letting Go and Letting In by Xin-Yu Peng in the non-professional division. My choices focus instead on the works that remained interesting after the first glancethe pieces that made me stop, reread, reconsider, and occasionally mutter, “Well, now I have questions.”
Research basis for the competition structure, official winners, and published editorial selection:
Why the 2023 LICC Art Selection Stands Out
Contemporary art is less interested in obeying old boundaries than in testing whether those boundaries were useful in the first place. A photograph may be embroidered. A graphite drawing may become a digital inversion. An advertising illustration may function like a cultural time capsule. An artificial intelligence system may generate the starting image, while a human artist decides what it means, how it should be edited, and whether it deserves to exist outside a computer screen.
That flexible approach appears throughout the 2023 LICC selections. The competition recognizes professional and non-professional creators across categories including CREATE, ILLUSTRATE, SHOOT, BUILD, DECORATE, and USE. Interestingly, Kyo Chen’s The World Awaits You appears in LICC’s illustration listings, even though it fits comfortably beside the more conventional art entries in this collection. That overlap is not a problem. It is the point. Modern creative work rarely pauses to show its passport at the border between art and design.
The following pieces were chosen for concept, execution, originality, emotional resonance, and the difficult-to-measure quality known as “I am still thinking about this three hours later.”
Context on contemporary, digital, and cross-media art:
The 10 Top Art Pieces From the 2023 London International Creative Competition
1. “Art Goes Beyond Imagination” by Daniel McKinley
Daniel McKinley’s Art Goes Beyond Imagination earns the first position because it feels less like a single statement and more like a declaration of creative independence. The accompanying text describes people looking through windows, moving through doors, reading, listening to music, and using nearly every available experience to reach beyond ordinary life.
That theme could easily become sentimental. McKinley avoids that trap by treating imagination not as a decorative luxury but as a form of movement. Art becomes an exit, an entrance, and possibly an emergency staircase. The work asks viewers to consider whether daily life is a fixed environment or simply the raw material from which other realities can be constructed.
McKinley has described his broader practice as difficult to place within one established school or genre. That uncertainty strengthens this piece. It does not arrive with a tidy instruction manual. Instead, it encourages the viewer to participate in the act of going “beyond,” wherever that happens to lead.
2. “Project to Save Millions People” by Eisui
Eisui’s Project to Save Millions People responds to the human suffering caused by the war in Ukraine. Its conceptual setting draws on Ukraine’s famous Tunnel of Love and introduces the figure of a Bodhisattva, a being associated with compassion and the desire to relieve suffering.
The piece is powerful because it does not pretend that art can stop a war by itself. Instead, it confronts the painful space between witnessing tragedy and feeling unable to change it. The artist’s question is not “How do I become a hero?” but “What can I do when the scale of suffering exceeds my power?” That is a more honest question, and therefore a more unsettling one.
By placing compassion in a landscape associated with romance, the work expands the meaning of love beyond couples and postcards. Love becomes endurance, responsibility, grief, and the decision to keep caring when caring hurts.
3. “Memory Bug in Life” by Ayako Hirayama
Ayako Hirayama explores the unreliable relationship between memory and reality in Memory Bug in Life. The artist focuses on forgotten moments, mental gaps, and the strange internal errors that appear when the brain edits our personal history without first requesting permission.
The phrase “memory bug” is especially effective. It borrows the language of technology to describe a deeply human experience. We like to imagine memory as a private archive, complete with neatly labeled folders. In practice, it behaves more like an overworked intern who has misplaced half the documents and confidently invented the rest.
Hirayama’s interest in the strangeness of ordinary life gives the work its emotional tension. The subject is not dramatic amnesia but the everyday mismatch between what happened, what we remember, and what we need to believe happened. That gap can be humorous, frightening, or both before breakfast.
Individual entry details for the first three selections:
4. “The World Awaits You” by Kyo Chen
Created around China Airlines’ post-pandemic campaign, Kyo Chen’s The World Awaits You uses illustrations of 12 major city destinations to revive the excitement of international travel. Local cultural elements and small visual details invite viewers to remember previous journeys while imagining new ones.
Commercially commissioned art is sometimes dismissed as less meaningful than gallery work, but this project demonstrates how design can capture a historical mood. After years of border restrictions, canceled plans, and vacations that consisted largely of walking from the bedroom to the refrigerator, travel acquired emotional weight. A plane ticket was no longer merely transportation; it represented reconnection.
Chen’s illustrations translate that feeling into approachable imagery. The project is optimistic without becoming sugary, nostalgic without becoming trapped in the past, and detailed enough to reward slow viewing. It also proves that useful art can still be delightful art.
5. “The Artist Parts #1 and Part #2 Diptych” by Marshall Harris
Marshall Harris uses a reverse drawing process to create The Artist Parts #1 and Part #2 Diptych. He draws a negative image in graphite on Mylar, scans the finished work, digitally inverts it, and presents the original beside its positive counterpart.
The technique is clever, but the work is more than a technical party trick. Light becomes shadow, shadow becomes light, and the two panels depend on one another. A diptych traditionally joins two images into a shared unit, and Harris uses that format to turn artistic process into subject matter. Viewers see not only the result but also its visual opposite.
There is something wonderfully stubborn about creating a large graphite drawing only to reverse its values digitally. It combines patient handwork with software, proving that traditional and digital techniques do not have to settle their differences in a parking lot. They can collaborate.
6. “A Knot in the Heart” by Zhong Tian
Zhong Tian’s A Knot in the Heart visualizes the emotional burdens people create, tighten, and carry. The artist describes these inner knots as sources of struggle and suffocation, suggesting that release begins when people recognize their own role in maintaining them.
The idea is simple enough to understand immediately, but it is not simplistic. Emotional pain often feels like something imposed from outside, even when fear, resentment, guilt, or expectation has continued tying the rope from within. The work’s emphasis on self-recognition gives it psychological depth without turning it into a motivational poster wearing expensive shoes.
Zhong Tian’s interest in black-and-white creative photography is well suited to the subject. Removing color can concentrate attention on form, contrast, gesture, and tension. Darkness becomes more than an absence of light; it becomes part of the emotional vocabulary.
Research for selections four through six and diptych context:
7. “Duchi Lesa” (“Spirits of the Forest”) by Ekaterina Starovoitova
Ekaterina Starovoitova’s Duchi Lesa, translated as Spirits of the Forest, grows from childhood fairy tales and inherited storytelling traditions. The artist recalls imagining magical worlds, cutting figures from paper, and placing them near her bed. For this project, she combined photography with embroidery, constructing the story stitch by stitch.
The physical act of embroidery matters. It slows the image down. Each stitch requires attention, repetition, and touch, transforming folklore from a remembered story into a material process. The method also connects the artist with generations of women who used textile work to preserve narratives, identity, domestic history, and private emotion.
The result feels simultaneously personal and ancient. Forest spirits may belong to fantasy, but the human desire to populate darkness with stories is very real. Apparently, people have always looked at a suspicious tree branch and thought, “That probably has opinions about me.”
8. “The Dog” by Karen Divine
Karen Divine creates composite photography through an intuitive process she describes as working without a predetermined intellectual plan. Beginning with colors and forms drawn from her own photographs, she allows the image to develop through spontaneous decisions about balance, texture, and visual relationships.
The Dog represents this layered approach. Rather than treating photography as a single captured instant, Divine builds a new visual environment from overlapping fragments. The process resembles the way people actually experience the world: not as a perfectly organized sequence, but as a stack of impressions, sounds, colors, half-noticed shapes, and reminders that the dog still needs to be walked.
Her method challenges the assumption that creative control requires planning every detail in advance. Intuition is not the absence of discipline. It is a different kind of disciplineone based on sensitivity, adjustment, and knowing when an image has finally stopped asking for more.
9. “Fictional Still Lifes” by N. A. Vague
N. A. Vague’s Fictional Still Lifes uses artificial intelligence to generate images of objects that appear familiar but resist identification. The artist then upscales, edits, and prints the images on photographic paper, returning machine-generated forms to the physical world.
The project refreshes the traditional still-life genre by removing the most basic requirement: recognizable objects. Classical still lifes often use fruit, flowers, vessels, food, or domestic items to explore beauty, mortality, consumption, and time. Vague’s objects seem to come from a world where those categories almost exist but were translated badly during interdimensional shipping.
More importantly, the series asks whether artificial intelligence is creative and how artists should respond when generative systems produce results that are not fully predictable. Those questions have become central to contemporary art. AI can function as a tool, collaborator, disruptor, or extremely confident assistant who occasionally invents a new species of spoon.
10. “Shadow Self” by Yanjun Chen
Yanjun Chen’s Shadow Self examines the emotional lives of young women raised under China’s one-child policy. Through illustration, the artist explores loneliness, psychological pressure, contradiction, fantasy, and the experience of developing an identity within a dominant cultural narrative.
The “shadow” in the title suggests the private self that remains hidden behind acceptable behavior. Chen creates space for impulses and emotions that do not fit the approved story. The work is therefore both personal and generational, connecting individual fantasy with a broader social history.
What makes the project compelling is its refusal to present imagination as mere escape. Fantasy becomes a survival space where suppressed feelings can take form. By illustrating that inner world, Chen offers recognition to viewers whose experiences may have been difficult to name publicly.
Research for selections seven through ten and the wider AI-art debate:
What These Creative Artworks Have in Common
At first glance, the 10 pieces appear to have little in common. One addresses war. Another promotes post-pandemic travel. Others explore memory, folklore, emotional pain, artificial intelligence, cultural pressure, and the creative possibilities of reversing a graphite drawing.
The connecting thread is transformation. McKinley transforms ordinary experience into a doorway beyond imagination. Eisui transforms helplessness into a meditation on compassion. Hirayama turns memory failure into a portrait of human strangeness. Chen converts a travel campaign into a record of global reopening. Harris transforms a negative drawing into its visual opposite, while Starovoitova moves fairy tales through photography and embroidery.
Even the more technology-centered works follow this pattern. Divine turns separate photographs into an intuitive composite reality. Vague converts machine-generated images into physical prints. Yanjun Chen transforms hidden psychological conflict into a visible illustrated world.
This may be the most useful lesson from the 2023 London International Creative Competition: originality does not always mean inventing something from absolutely nothing. That would be difficult, because humans have already painted fruit, sculpted marble, photographed dogs, and placed mysterious objects in galleries while standing nearby with serious expressions. Originality often comes from transforming familiar materials, emotions, and formats until they reveal an unfamiliar possibility.
My Experience Choosing the 10 Top LICC 2023 Art Pieces
Choosing these 10 works was less like judging a race and more like organizing a dinner party for guests who communicate through completely different artistic languages. A conceptual artist was seated beside a commercial illustrator. A black-and-white photographer shared the table with an AI experimenter. Embroidery arrived with a camera. Graphite brought Photoshop as its plus-one.
I began by looking for immediate visual or conceptual impact, but that criterion quickly proved insufficient. Some works announce themselves instantly. Others need their artist statements before the doors unlock. I do not consider that a weakness. Art does not always have to explain itself in the first five seconds, especially when social media has trained viewers to swipe away from anything that does not perform a small circus act immediately.
The strongest pieces became more interesting after I learned how they were made. Marshall Harris’ diptych is a good example. A viewer can appreciate the contrast between its two parts without knowing the process. Once the reverse graphite technique is understood, however, the relationship between those panels becomes richer. The method is no longer behind-the-scenes trivia; it is part of the meaning.
The same happened with Duchi Lesa. Photography and embroidery already create an intriguing visual combination, but the connection to childhood paper worlds, fairy tales, ancestral experience, and generations of women’s textile work changes the emotional temperature of the piece. What first appears decorative becomes meditative and autobiographical.
I also found myself reconsidering the role of commissioned work. The World Awaits You originated in a commercial travel context, yet it captures the emotional atmosphere of reopening after the pandemic more clearly than many solemn attempts to document the period. Art history does not only happen in museums. Sometimes it appears in calendars, posters, product packaging, transit stations, and airline campaigns.
Fictional Still Lifes was the hardest work to evaluate because AI-generated imagery arrives with a suitcase full of ethical, legal, and artistic arguments. However, the artist does more than type a prompt and declare victory. The project deliberately examines uncertainty, authorship, machine unpredictability, and the movement from generated image to edited physical print. I may not have resolved the entire AI-art debate while reviewing itapologies to civilizationbut the work successfully made the debate visible.
The emotional pieces required a different kind of attention. Project to Save Millions People, A Knot in the Heart, and Shadow Self address suffering without using identical strategies. One looks outward toward war and compassion. One turns inward toward self-created emotional restraint. One connects private conflict with the social consequences of a national policy. Ranking them numerically felt slightly absurd, like assigning medals to different forms of vulnerability.
Ultimately, I chose pieces that rewarded curiosity. They did not need to be beautiful in the traditional sense, nor did they need to arrive with a lecture attached. They needed to create a productive gap between what I saw, what I understood, and what I wanted to investigate next.
That is the experience I value most in an international creative competition. The best work does not simply demonstrate technical skill. It enlarges the viewer’s mental territory. After looking at it, the world contains one more idea than it did before.
Conclusion: A Competition Built for Creative Risk
The 2023 London International Creative Competition demonstrated that contemporary art is not moving in one direction. It is moving in dozens of directions at oncetoward technology, memory, activism, design, folklore, psychology, commercial culture, handmade processes, and combinations that would have confused an art professor from a century ago.
My top selection, Daniel McKinley’s Art Goes Beyond Imagination, captures the spirit connecting the entire list. Every featured artist attempts to move beyond something: conventional technique, personal limitation, historical trauma, fixed identity, recognizable objects, or the boundary between physical and digital creation.
Not every viewer will agree with this ranking, which is fortunate. A universal agreement about art would be suspicious and probably indicate that everyone had been replaced by extremely polite robots. The more valuable outcome is discussion: which piece stayed with you, which one challenged you, and which one made you question what contemporary art can become?
