How Hannah Li paints light, and the quiet moment just before something happens

A train station empties. Light falls across an armchair in an empty room. A city corner waits in anticipation. Nothing dramatic is happening in Hannah Li's paintings, which is what she loves to capture. "I'm drawn to moments that feel suspended in time," Hannah tells Creative Boom, "places where something has just happened, or is about to happen."

Hannah is a Chinese illustrator living in New York City, and light has always been the centre of everything she sees. Whether she's considering interiors and everyday scenes or train stations and street corners, light is always right there. She also loves to capture those moments when something is about to happen, or it's just passed. Looking through her recent paintings, you could mistake them for photographs, depicting a frozen moment in time.

Hannah studied oil painting in China before moving to the United States in 2013 for an MFA in illustration at SCAD. Her fine art background is clear just in how she handles colour and atmosphere. Since graduating, she has mostly worked in illustration, building a substantial editorial and publishing career. Her clients include The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar Germany. And she's helped create more than 20 non-fiction books for publishers including Penguin, Macmillan, and Usborne.

Publishing was, she admits, a serious education. "It taught me how to communicate complex ideas clearly," she says, "and how to adapt my visual language across a wide range of subjects." For a few years, non-fiction was the centre of her practice.

Then something changed. After what she describes as a "series of personal transitions", Hannah stepped away from long-term book commissions to rebuild her art practice. Finding her voice again, she realised she loved observation and curiosity, spotting the present moments we often miss. It made her feel like herself again, rather than working to another brief.

The resulting series is called The Way Back – illustrations that are "less interested in narrative than in perception". She explains it's "the feeling of standing between movement and stillness, familiarity and distance, belonging and solitude". "It's about noticing the in-between rather than the big headline," she says.

Much of the artworks began on the move. They draw on things Hannah noticed while travelling through Paris, Rome, New York and other cities over the last two years. "Through colour, atmosphere and carefully observed details," she says, "I try to capture small moments where light, space and memory quietly intersect."

It celebrates the art of slowing down, which she very much needed after such a busy career in publishing. It begs the question: if you weren't working for clients, what would you turn to creatively?