Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan is a multi-award-winning writer, pencillist, graphic artist and filmmaker who was born and schooled in Western Australia and now lives in Melbourne. Tan's work is quite category diverse, and his books have been marketed as comics, young adult graphic novels and children's picture books. He cites Ray Bradbury (Science Fiction author) and Tim Burton (film director, producer) amongst his influences.

Tan's work is a quirky, dark but ultimately empowering take on unusual, and banal, life situations. He uses experimental techniques to explore themes such as the migrant experience, the environment and the strange and absurd amongst the familiar, in ordinary suburban settings.

Of his many awards, perhaps the most notable is the Academy Award he won in early 2011 in the Short Animated Film category for The Lost Thing, which was adapted from his book of the same title.

The Arrival (2006) is a wordless story which illustrates the struggles of a migrant family through the medium of hundreds of images, the originals of which were pencil on paper. The upheaval they face is represented by ubiquitous yet completely unfamiliar objects, animals, foods and processes. Shaun Tan comments that the separateness and misunderstandings faced by his own family partly influenced this work, as did the universal issues of change, uncertainties and new realities that confront us all at times. It is a dark but ultimately hopeful piece.

Acrylic, oils and collage were used by Tan to create the colourful images for The Lost Thing (2000), a story about a boy who, whilst out collecting bottle tops, discovers a strange, lost creature whom he befriends. The boy tries to help the creature find where he belongs, and is careful to ensure that he finds the right place. The story is comedic though there is melancholy when the boy and The Lost Thing must finally part. This story has won several awards, been made into an Academy-award-winning short animated film, and the artwork has been exhibited.

The story of The Rabbits (1998) was written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan using a variety of mediums including acrylic, gouache, oils, ink and coloured pencil. The story is a metaphor for colonisation from the viewpoint of the usurped population, which is left bewildered, anxious and decimated by the colonising power. The parallels with European colonisation of Australia are evident but this story could be representative of the countless Indigenous populations of people and animals irreversibly affected by such change. This award-winning piece was intended for older readers, and as is often the case with picture books, was mistaken as a book for young children and therefore criticised for its confronting theme.

In commenting about picture books, the most common form of his work, Tan says,

While I describe them as 'picture books', they are not created with children in mind, but rather a general audience. I see each book as an experiment in visual and written narrative, part of an ongoing exploration of this fascinating literary form...

It's about showing and telling, a window for learning to 'read' in a broad sense, exploring relationships between words, pictures and the world we experience every day. But is this an activity that ends with childhood, when at some point we are sufficiently qualified to graduate from one medium to another?

Simplicity certainly does not exclude sophistication or complexity; we inherently know that the truth is otherwise. "Art," as Einstein reminds us, "is the expression of the most profound thoughts in the simplest way."

http://www.shauntan.net/books.html, accessed November - December 2011

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