（Asia University, Taiwan）AU master’s student Jing-Wei Liu from the Visual Communication Department (VCD), with his artwork, “Nature Mullet Roe,” was awarded recently by nine international design competitions held in the USA, UK, and Europe, including a gold medal offered by the famous Belgium packaging design award, Pentawards. This is really another great success of Liu after he obtained two famous international design awards in the last two years, one being the 2015 JIA Illustration Competition Award in Japan and the other the RedDot Design Award in Germany. The Dean of the Creative Design College of AU, Prof. C. H. Wang, pointed out that it is really commendable that Liu’s single artistic work can be awarded in so many intensive international competitions.

Jing-Wei Liu said that his series packaging artwork “Nature Mullet Roe” is a style of fish pringting, showing the mullet shape and the fishing process. So far, this artwork has won nine awards, namely, the RedDot Design Award from Germany, Pentawards from Belgium, Joseph Binder Award from Austria, Graphis from Switzerland, World Star for Packaging from Chicago, CQ41 Competition from New York, Louise Wilson International Design Award, London International Creativity Awards, and A' Design Award from Italy. Liu said also that he has attended the ceremony of A' Design Award in Italy in June, and is planning to Shanghai, China to attend the Pentawards Awarding Ceremony in September.

Why Liu’s work can obtain so many awards? For this question, Jing-Wei Liu mentioned that mullet fish is said to be the “black gold” in the sea which comes from the nature, and so his packaging design is based on the concept of environment protection, and can be reused over and over again. He emphasized that this design concept is maybe the main reason of obtaining the multiple appreciations from the international reviewers of the awards.

Jing-Wei Liu is a master student of the Visual Communication Design Dept. at AU. He wins many other famous international design awards. For example, his series illustrations, “The Little Bag,” based on the concept of self-evaluation and positioning in a story of a lonely “bag” traveler, wins not only a RedDot design award, but also a great Japanese award given by the JIA Illustration Competition. About the latter, it is the first time that a participant of the contest from Taiwan wins such a JIA award; and the work is given with the good comment “the work gives the sense of a movie.”

“It is a great pleasure that my works are appreciated internationally, and I will continue to make efforts to create more good works;” said Liu, “besides completing my pursue of the MS degree at AU, I am going to finishing an illustration book “The Little Bag” in August and get it published.”