Since it opened, Fan-Fan has become a campus hub where students gather to eat, socialize, and study. Most recently, the restaurant has upgraded its interior decor with a new mural.
At the start of April 2025, Fan-Fan owner Lijun Liu, San Diego-based artist Lulu Yueming Qu, and third-year student Nhi Tran made plans for a mural inside the beloved restaurant. Their goal? To center unity in the UC San Diego community and highlight students’ college experiences. In a roundtable interview, The UCSD Guardian delved deeper into the makings of the mural and learned about the message the mural makers want to send to students.
The mural depicts iconic spots across UCSD such as the Snake Path, the King Triton sculpture located outside of Price Center, and Fallen Star. Liu hopes to weave these locations into one combined landscape as part of his effort to make Fan-Fan a welcoming atmosphere for students.
“We [included] all the colleges, all the schools, all the iconic spots over here,” Liu said. “And [when] people come here, they will take pictures, take selfies. They feel like, ‘Oh, this is my home. … Oh, this is a place I can relate to. Oh, that’s my college.’”
Liu and Qu especially wanted to incorporate a student perspective to ensure the mural would resonate with UCSD students.
“We were talking about some things that we could add to maybe bring some more color balance, more diversity, since there’s many students that come to Fan-Fan that belong to different types of identities and backgrounds,” Tran explained.
Through phone calls, feedback, and revisions of various original designs for the mural, Tran helped the team bring together the essence of UCSD students.
“We … tried to refine the colleges so that it’s the most accurate representation of what each college is, instead of their stereotypical view or just very general information that you may find online,” Tran said.
Qu used Tran’s perspective to paint the mural. In her own work, Qu finds beauty in the differences between natural and man-made elements of the world. Brought onto the project through a mutual friend, Qu connected her personal style to Liu’s goals for the mural. Her eye for detail focuses the mural on the contrast between UCSD’s brutalist architecture and the nature surrounding the campus.
“So, if you’ll see my other paintings, like San Diego ones or other neighborhoods in San Diego, I always combine architecture and nature together,” Qu said. “I feel like the whole earth [combines] nature and human beings’ cultures together. So, if I draw a campus, I would definitely include a lot of nature [and] plants, like green colors, as much as I can.”
Qu kept this promise in her work for Fan-Fan. Incorporating a combination of blues, grays, and earthy tones to illustrate the surrounding landscape, Qu designed the mural to evoke a combination of serenity and unity through different line patterns, using straight lines for buildings and more flexible lines for trees and greenery.
“So, for me, [my favorite part is] the library … because there’s a lot of very straight lines,” Qu said. “Straight lines in murals are a little harder than the other lines. … So, that is a pretty complicated thing to paint on. So, it feels like I conquered myself on that architecture.”
Qu added that she hopes students will find that the painting aligns with their college identity.
“It’s like a connection,” Qu said. “When students come here to eat, to see the mural, it’s not just eating and looking at the food all the time. They can eat and at the same time appreciate the campus through the murals and connect. Like, ‘Oh, this is my school.’”
Tran shared that her favorite part of the mural reflects this exact personal connection.
“For me, my favorite part within the mural is a little biased, but it’s the Fallen Star because I come from Warren,” Tran said. “I love the Fallen Star, and I would always study at Geisel a lot.”
Liu’s main goal for the establishment is to be a space for students to bond and socialize, in addition to serving delicious food. He hopes the mural honors this mission.
“The big picture is that we are really helping the community,” Liu said. “I know there are places where students go to study, and they have to jump to another place to get food. We want to kind of mingle them together. … You can see, my slogan is, ‘your home away from home.’”
