This artist’s most-used tool isn’t a paintbrush — it’s a pair of sneakers

Text by Lilit Marcus, Video by Justin Robertson, CNN

Beijing/Hong Kong (CNN) — In the top corner, there’s a very small Star of David. On the center right side, the number 51. Near the center, a pentagon. Squint and you might notice a teeny-tiny series of music notes amid a busy grid. And, wait, is that the US Capitol missing its dome?

British artist Gareth Fuller doesn’t make the kinds of maps you’d find in an atlas. They’re not done to scale and don’t include street names. He calls them “mind maps,” and they’re his artistic representations of time spent walking around and exploring cities — in this case, Washington, DC.

In an age of Google Maps, with many using their phones to navigate new places, Fuller believes people have lost their sense of discovery. That’s why he began doing these large-scale pen and ink drawings, which he calls his “personal geography.”

In his DC work, there’s an itsy-bitsy PBS logo, because the broadcaster has its headquarters in the nation’s capital. There’s also a pattern inspired by the trademark breezeblock ceilings of the DC metro system, flowers to represent the National Arboretum, and the Potomac River cutting through it all. That number 51? It’s a shoutout to the movement that wants to make the District of Columbia into the 51st state.

You could stare at these mind maps all day and still not catch every detail— which is exactly how Fuller wants it. For each of his drawings, he spends months or even years exploring cities as much as he can on foot. And, he explains, the maps don’t just incorporate what he sees – they build on anecdotes, random conversations and human experiences that happen along the way. They’re also not very helpful if you need an actual map – the Pentagon, for example, is out in the Virginia suburbs, not in DC proper.

“The maps are very much a kind of emotional portrayal of the place,” Fuller says. “It’s a real privilege to be an artist in that respect. People are quite warm to tell you about where they live, and what’s important to them, and their personal stories, and where they’ve come from. The conversation can go in all sorts of ways.”

Fuller says his love of wayfinding began in childhood. Raised in rural Wales, he joined the Boy Scouts and learned how to use a compass and flashlight to find his way home without a map. Moving to London as an adult, he got to know the frantic, wiry place on foot. As he became interested in art, he began to see his doodles of places as “problem-solving with ink and lines.”

But it was a move to China where Fuller’s work truly blossomed.

One of Fuller’s friends was studying in Beijing, so Fuller packed up his bicycle, crashed at his friend’s apartment and tried to learn Mandarin.

The result of the year spent off and on in the capital inspired his largest work to date. The Beijing map is littered with fountains, pagodas, power plants, building cranes, and flowers. There are hutongs, the famous side streets where everyday life happens in Beijing, alongside mega-skyscrapers. The central motif is a piece of the Great Wall, snaking through the map like a snake, with bicycles on top – intentional, as Fuller got to know the city while riding around on two wheels.

“Coming from somewhere like London, and then coming to somewhere like China, and seeing a Chinese city function, and at the cusp of quite mod ideas in terms of the smart city and things like this, and it was just the cultural aspect. I was just kind of dumped upside down. I don’t want to sort of fetishize Chinese culture, but as a Westerner, it was a huge education. It was exciting.”

The person most affected by Fuller’s artwork is, of course, Fuller himself. He has relocated to China permanently, gotten married and become a dad. His current works-in-progress are viewed through the lens of a toddler as much as they are from an adult man.

If you try to use Fuller’s “Beijing” as a map to Beijing, it won’t help you get around. But if you use it as an emotional pathway to understand a large, complicated and dynamic place, it might help you get to know the city as a friend. Perhaps you’ll get an entirely different city than the one he visited, one personalized to your own random encounters and accidental discoveries.

“We’ve always done this, as humans,” Fuller says. “We will navigate our way through towns, cities, villages, and we will talk and seek shelter with each other and trust.”

Fuller’s work will soon come to the US for an exhibit at Stony Brook University in upstate New York. Walking the World: Gareth Fuller’s Art of Place will run from September 9 to December 18 at the college’s Skylight Gallery.

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