‘The Nameless Girl’ – Shaun Tan – bid at $850

Shaun Tan

Melbourne/ Iramoo, unceded land of the Wurundjeri people.

Shaun Tan is an internationally acclaimed artist, author and film-maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated short film adaptation of the 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated.
Shaun has had his work translated into an abundance of languages, adapted into plays and orchestral scores.

He has a subtle knack for subverting the familiar and through fantastical narratives bringing an audience on a journey back to understanding with a renewed perspective of the world. 

As the son of an immigrant father and an Australian mother, Shaun was naturally positioned as the outsider. Although, he found his diminutive size to ultimately be more othering than any racial element.

Growing up in Perth he would wander the stark suburban streets and take short cuts through the bush. At school he quickly worked out that the best way to connect with his peers was through drawing and humour.

‘I liked that it was both homely and a bit desolate – very long stretches of empty, wild, sun-blasted beach, and huddled against it a warm community of middle-class suburbanites he said.  ‘At least this was my experience.’

Shaun is pretty reluctant to claim drawing as some luminous and elite thing reserved for him and a chosen few.

His childhood friends were really the first to assign him the title of ‘the good drawer’.

The question ‘when did you start drawing’ elicits his favourite response: ‘When did you stop?’

He points out that most children, given a pencil, intuitively gravitate towards drawing and writing. He just never stopped.

That said, Shaun was raised in a richly creative and artistically supportive environment. His father was an architect and designed their house, which Shaun’s mother then built with him. His mother was also skilled at seeing the forms that made up the things around her and and translating them to the page.

Later, Shaun discovered that she had always held a dream of becoming a Disney animator.

He remembers making kites with his father: ‘I first learnt about kites from my Chinese Malaysian father,’ Shaun recalls. ‘He used to make them from bamboo grown in the backyard with rice paper stretched over them. I remember especially him lightly spraying the paper with water to tighten it like a drum over the frame. They were very light and difficult to balance.

‘I think my parents had a big influence on me, not so much in teaching me anything artistic – I rarely recall lessons in creativity per se – but in patient persistence, the joy or getting difficult things right, especially those things that might at first seem a little pointless.

‘As kites wonderfully are.’

His first commissions were adorably for his father and later on, more seriously, for the canteen ladies, for their new burger creation ‘The Space Burger’. From there, he sent a drawing to the ‘Aurealis: The Australian magazine of fantasy and science fiction’ and had his first cover proudly published at 15.

Shaun had developed an interest in fantasy and science fiction, not so much for the genre components but because they alluded to a potential multiplicity of worlds. He was raised during what some might call a sci-fi/fantasy gold age, viewing the freshly released ‘E.T.’, ‘Blade Runner’, ‘The Dark Crystal’ and ‘Mad Max’.

The stories he finds hopeful and uplifting are somewhat unusual.

‘Oddly, it is pretty dark or bizarre stories that lift my spirits,’ he said.

‘I was originally drawn to the idea of being a writer after watching episodes of the original Twilight Zone as a kid. I liked the often disturbing, mind-bending endings. As an adult I like books such as Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ which could also be considered dreadfully depressing.

‘Why do they lift my spirits and give me hope? I think it’s that they handle disturbing and troubling things and try to find goodness in them, and there is something honest and a bit relieving about this. That by making art, telling stories, walking through these bad dreams, we can hold onto some positive meaning.’

As the TV played ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ casting black and white shadows on young Shaun and his father’s face, he had a revelation about ‘creatures’, an all encompassing term for any strange being. Shaun’s adult work has led him, and his devoted readers, through many surrealist daydreams. This is because Shaun has the wonderful capacity to see how strange the world around him is; In fact, how strange he is, and everyone else too.

‘As a child I longed for snow,’ he said. ‘In Western Australia. Wasn’t going to happen, but I dreamt about it all the time. Mum would sometimes defrost the fridge though.’

Through his perceptive lens, Shaun is able to tackle socio-political and historical themes in beautiful and clever ways. His short story, ‘Alert But Not Alarmed’, is a lovely representation of a very serious topic approached with humour and humanity. The government sends missiles to each occupant in a suburban area, and as a national security measure, they are to repaint them grey once a year. Over the years residents start to paint them other colours and patterns, even decorating them seasonally.

This story is reminiscent of the powerful images of the 1960’s anti-war protests, in which flowers were placed into the barrels of soldier’s guns. It is a diffusing of violence and tension with a gently comedic juxtaposition of flowers and guns, in this case, baby pink missiles, chalk drawings and Christmas lights.

Another theme of this story, that is found in other works of Shaun’s, is the impersonality of bureaucracy, its complexity and distance eventually rendering it meaningless.

‘The Lost Thing’, ’The Arrival’ and ‘Cicada’ are all infused with this idea.

Shaun also loves to incorporate symbols into his work. ‘The Arrival’ is a magnificent example, because instead of familiar symbols, it is entirely made up of his own imagined symbols. He also creates is own typologies constructed of known letters re-structured to appear foreign. In doing this, he ensures the audience of The Arrival will experience the world as the main character does –  as an asylum seeker.

‘Eric’ is a more light-hearted exploration of similar themes of differences across cultures and pluralism.

Shaun explains that he does not  begin a project with a fully formed idea. For him drawing is how he thinks and the process needs to remain open and receptive. His stories are purposefully suggestive and invite readers to imagine their own reasons and backstory for events. He himself is often unsure of the exact meanings and motives.

Now, Shaun lives in the inner suburbs of Melbourne where he loves the diversity, and the freedom for people to explore their individuality.

‘I miss some of the wildness of my childhood landscape, but this place has its own kind of poetry and there is a nice sense of community here too.’

There he is presently engrossed in a few different projects. 

‘I’m painting landscapes and working a little on a TV adaptation of one of my books, which is an interesting process. I’m also thinking about a graphic novel involving a girl raised by non-human beings, something I’ve been sketching for years, just trying to draw it together into a coherent story.’

‘My kite represents the nameless girl from The Red Tree in a state of blissful flight.

‘Years ago, when I was illustrating The Red Tree, I had a sketch of the central girl in that story turning into a plane or a kite, and drifting away; also watching herself drift away like this, in a kind of blissful state that may or may not be reachable. I’m not sure what that meant entirely, which is part of the appeal.

‘It’s a character I have not painted in a long time, and so nice to revisit.’

 The kite’s tail is inspired by a kite flying experience with his brother. ‘Once our kite was followed by a swarm of bees, sidewinding through the air for ages, perhaps attracted to the bright red tail on an otherwise dull-looking kite. This memory informed the red tail on my own kite here.’

If you would like to hear Shaun talking about his art and inspirations, follow the link below to a really good interview.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=youtube+shaun+tan+talking&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:c3f63096,vid:3S3v4RVOkXo,st:0

by Adelaide Stolba

 

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‘The Nameless Girl’ – Shaun Tan – bid at $850 by Shaun Tan

‘The Nameless Girl’ – Shaun Tan – bid at $850

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