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

There's a beautiful stillness to Hannah Li's latest work. A train station empties. Light falls across an armchair in an empty room. A city corner waits in anticipation. Nothing dramatic is happening, and that's rather the point. "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 based in New York City, and light has always been the centre of everything she sees. Through interiors, city corners, train stations, and everyday scenes, she explores how light shapes our memories and changes our emotional relationship with space. It is a happy obsession that gives her images their gentle charm: you arrive a little too early, or a little too late, and you feel the difference.

Her practice runs through fine art. Hannah studied oil painting in China before moving to the United States in 2013 for an MFA in illustration at SCAD, and that grounding in paint still shows in the way she handles colour and atmosphere. Since graduating, she has built a substantial editorial and publishing career, with work for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar Germany, as well as more than 20 non-fiction books for publishers including Penguin, Macmillan, and Usborne.

That publishing run was, by her own account, a serious education. Working closely with authors, editors and art directors taught her visual problem-solving, long-form storytelling and the benefit of collaboration. "It taught me how to communicate complex ideas clearly," she says, "while adapting 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 and life transitions, Hannah felt the pull back towards her own voice. She began stepping away from long-term book commissions and rebuilding her art around observation, curiosity and presence – making for herself again, rather than to another brief.

The result is an ongoing personal series called The Way Back. Rather than documenting specific events, it traces her relationship with the world after she, as she puts it, "returns to herself". The illustrations are less interested in narrative than in perception: the feeling of standing between movement and stillness, familiarity and distance, belonging and solitude. They ask you to notice the in-between rather than the big headline.

Much of the series began on the move. The pieces draw on things Hannah noticed while travelling through Paris, Rome, New York and other cities over the past 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's work that celebrates the art of slowing down, which feels like something she needed for herself after such a busy career in publishing. Beyond books and editorial work, The Way Back asks her only to look, and to trust that a reader will recognise the feeling without being told what it actually is.