Yiying Lu is an artist, designer, educator and public speaker, recognized for creating the Twitter Fail Whale[1], the Unicode dumpling 🥟 & boba tea 🧋 emoji[2], and Disney Shanghai Paper-cut Mickey Mouse.

[4] While earning her degree, Lu created a digital artwork titled "Lifting a Dreamer" to send birthday wishes to a friend living far away.

[7] While living in Sydney, Australia, Lu received requests from fans in San Francisco to create artwork for the first Fail Party—a lighthearted gathering of 200 people celebrating failure during the 2008 financial crisis.

As the creator of Lifting a Dreamer, widely known as the "Twitter Fail Whale," an internet icon symbolizing resilience in failure, she designed a new art piece pro bono to uplift the community, despite never having met them in person or visited the U.S.

[13] In 2014, Lu created Chinese paper-cut versions of Mickey Mouse, Simba, Mulan, Elsa (Frozen), and Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs for the inaugural recruitment campaign of Shanghai Disneyland opening in 2016.

These are the dumpling (🥟), boba tea (🧋), fortune cookie (🥠), chopsticks (🥢), takeout box (🥡), and peacock (🦚), representing sights, foods, beverages, images, and animals common in Asia and Asian American communities.

A colleague recognized the impact of her insights and invited her to speak at Startup:CON in Seoul, Korea, where she met IDEO’s Tom Kelley and SXSW Co-President and Chief Programming Officer Hugh Forrest.

"[21] The piece included north pole animals such as the polar bear, red panda, koala, and whale shark to promote biological diversity and ocean conservation.

The works included adaptations of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and Henri Matisse’s The Dance.

In October 2023, Lu collaborated with James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award-winning chef Martin Yan on a live demonstration at the inaugural SXSW Sydney in celebration of World Food Day.