The best she's ever felt

"I felt a strong sense of achievement when I held the adorable figurine, so I decided to learn the different needling techniques," she says.

After Yin graduated from Beijing Film Academy, where she studied 3D animation design, she didn't hunt for a stable job or apply to postgraduate programs like most of her classmates, but chose to carry on needle felting.

She made many cute characters based on fairy tales and posted the pictures on social media, where she was widely encouraged by others online who were curious about the craft and fond of her work.

A few years later, Yin began to make money by regularly providing photos to magazines.

In 2015, a Chinese curator who worked in Japan noticed her felt pieces and asked if she want to run an exhibition in Tokyo.

Supported by her family and friends, she grabbed the chance with both hands and spent more than a year preparing for it.

She chose to make felt mushrooms the centerpiece of her Japanese debut.

"As a person who used to lack confidence, I just wanted to focus on my own stuff, unnoticed, in the corner. In this sense I usually compare myself to the mushrooms, which silently grow in corners," she explains.

Initially, she just wanted to challenge herself simulating the morphological features of mushrooms. Later, she started to make anthropomorphic mushrooms that could express her own various moods.

That was, arguably, a seminal moment for her, as from then on she actually started to use her felt sculptures as a medium for self-expression, she says.

Later, she decided to represented herself at different stages of her life through a series of felt animals, such as an elephant huddled up in frustration, a Sphinx cat with two heads－one carrying an angry expression, and the other in a state of torpor－and a 103-centimeter-high deer that appears to have found inner peace.