10 years today, Conan O’Brien premiered his new show CONAN on TBS, and debuted this art piece “Conan O’Brien Pale Whale” I created for the new Team Coco website & its Twitter page.
There was a miraculous backstory of why this project means a lot to me:
In January 2010, I was still a young artist living in Sydney Australia. I was going through a lot of challenges and struggles. Things were not working out the way as I expected. I was feeling pressured, uninspired, and was not able to find any inspiration to create new artworks for months. The only things that gave me joy was watching recommended comedy episodes on YouTube. One video that caught my eye was an episode of Taiwanese 3D animated global news, featuring a U.S. talk show host who was being treated unfairly by a large TV network which he worked for more than 20 years, his name is Conan O’Brien. Before that, I had never known anything about Conan, as I have only spent time in China, Australia and the UK — and was not familiar with the US Television network.
But I felt very related to Conan, as I was experiencing an isomorphic situation. I was curious to find out what he would say to his fans on his Last Show on NBC. “Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you are kind, amazing things will happen!” I vividly remembered I found myself in tears as I heard this. It was the exact message I needed to hear. And it helped me restore my faith. I followed his advice to “Work Hard and Be Kind” and amazing things in deed happened:
Seven months later, completely out of the blue, I got an email titled “TBS…CONAN O’BRIEN” — it was from Turner Broadcasting System’s marketing team Ramon Cortes and James Wilcox, who invited me to create a custom Conan O’Brien “Fail Whale” to be featured on Twitter and his website for his new show debuting on November 8th, 2020. By then, after watching Conan’s shows for months, I was already a hug fan! This was a dream project for me.
I worked with TeamCoco in LA and the TBS team in Atlanta entirely virtually on this project, as I was still living in Sydney at that time. A few months later, I was so grateful and happy to see my artwork finally being debuted on his website and Twitter.
In December 2010, I had my first ever art show in San Francisco. On my way back to Sydney, I decided to have a layover in LA to meet Conan in person. My wonderful San Franciscan friends Brian and Cheryl were kind enough to drive me from SF to LA, and we met Conan and his Team in person.
Thank you, Conan and the entire Team Coco, for decades of laughter and showing me the true testimony: “If you work really hard and you are kind, amazing things will happen!”
Happy 10th Anniversary, Team Coco! 🧡🤍🐋
