Dadu Shin’s Crowd of Ghosts for Wired Magazine

A woman stands alone in the middle of a crowd. Around her, figures cluster in pairs and small groups. The entire scene is bathed in a single warm pink, and everyone in it is integrated into that field except her.

Dadu Shin created this illustration for Olivia Cheng’s Wired feature on Chinese adoptees searching for their birth parents — a story about one woman’s 14-year search across false DNA matches, incorrect paperwork, and a televised appeal before finally finding her family. Shin compresses that entire arc into a single crowd scene that functions as a portrait of solitude.

He occasionally works in this colored pencil and pastel style. These pieces have a sketchbook quality. Softer edges, figures that dissolve into the background. The strokes are loose and gestural, and the color palettes tend to be warm and hazy. The figures often feel ghostly, like they’re caught mid-movement.

A Brooklyn-based illustrator and RISD graduate, Shin has a long run of editorial work behind him including projects for The New York Times, NPR and Penguin Random House. His illustrations for ProPublica’s “The H-2A Visa Trap” by Max Blau and Zaydee Sanchez, were just nominated for Best Illustrated Stories at the 61st National Magazine Awards, American magazine publishing’s highest honor, presented annually by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.