KB Song is a Mongolian artist, (usually) based in China. Her and her partner were Roz's guides and translators when she went to visit one of the factories we manufacture with and she is an incredible artist! A true creative polymath, this collab was so joyful and we hope you love the outcome as much as we do. 

Read on to find out more about KB - currently in Tassie with a Tiger! A fuzzy felt one ;)

Let’s start with the basics. How are you? What did you do today? 

I’m good! Today I’ve been looking through new materials, just thinking of ideas for my next product line for my online business selling DIY handicraft packages on Taobao. I’m also trying a new recipe for the first time as we speak!

We would love to hear about your creative background.

I studied oil painting at a university in northern China, but ended up becoming a director of mini-films and promotional pieces at one of China’s big commercial TV stations. In the years before the pandemic I had just recently had two children, so I started turning more to freelancing and film editing from home. Since the pandemic I’ve been here in Tasmania running my online business from a continent away.

Your illustration for the new Tsuno Panty Liner box features a tiger, is there any meaning there? Tell us about your design and colour choices.

The tiger was mainly just an intuition that arose from my feel for the colour swatches I’d been given. I was aware that previous Tsuno designs had been more abstract and geometric, but I Iiked the design and thankfully so did Roz! No doubt we all feel a little bit closer to the savage beast inside us during our periods, but we also want to be treated airily and lightly and delicately, not least by ourselves! Hence the addition of the wings.

How do you nurture your creativity if you’re feeling uninspired? 

When I’m feeling uninspired I like to just get away from my workbench, snap out of artisan mode and just wait for something to come. It could be a snippet of conversation, something in a book, some random sound you hear - anything can be the spark of some new idea. When I was doing film direction and was constantly thinking about matching a visual scene with appropriate sounds, I got very attuned to that relationship and eventually I found I could work it in reverse and derive visual inspiration from sounds rather than vice versa. So that is another strategy I have - listening out for interesting sounds.

If you could talk to your period (which you can if you want to) what’s one thing you would say? If you would tell it a joke to lighten it up ;) please share.

This is an easy question for a Chinese girl to answer, because we are already so used to anthropomorphising our periods! As Roz probably knows, we have a very casual euphemism in Chinese for referring to our period which is “my old aunt’s come over”. As in, “oh sorry, I don’t feel like it tonight, my old aunt’s just come over”. So, what would I say to my old aunt? I would say to her, thanks for being so punctual over the years. Thanks for giving me my children. If it’s not too much to ask, please just try to be a little gentler to me when we see each other in person, or at least just spare me the aching back!

I also just want to say, a lot of professional women get asked this question about how they balance their career with motherhood or family life. But you rarely hear the same question asked of men! Knowing how to gracefully switch between the plurality of different roles we play in life is really important, and of course you can’t completely ignore the extra expectations that society places on you as a woman. But relative to these societal expectations, I feel like we should weight our own expectations of ourselves a lot more heavily than we sometimes do. Enjoy all the different roles you play, but keep your own personal goals central! This was just something I felt like I wanted to say, hehe.

The perfect box to have on display, strength when you need it most.
Shop Panty Liners here.