Shaun Tan. Award Laureate 2011 1
the curious child in us all” reads the introducti
on to The Viewer, a nightmarish, science fiction inspired work that plays games with perspective, time and space. The result is eerie but magnificent. Shaun Tan describes The Rabbits (1998) as a major step forward for him on a personal level. After initially not succeeding to get a proper feel for John Marsden’s text, he eventually found a solution. He presented, as he puts it, “… more unexpected ideas to build a parallel story of my own. Not an illustration of the text, but something to react with it symbiotically.” The book is a symbolic portrayal of Australia’s colonial past or, more generally, of what happens when a technologically advanced culture meets one rooted in nature. Shaun Tan describes The Rabbits as a story about power, ignorance and environmental destruction, but also as a dark, serious animal fable, a narrative form he believes is understood by everyone. The clear criticism of civilization in The Rabbits recurs frequently in Shaun Tan’s books, explicitly or implicitly, and is one of his core themes. The Lost Thing (2000) is a multi-layered, surrealist tale about identity and alienation, but also about opportunities. This is our first encounter with Shaun Tan as both author and illustrator. The restrained text is translated into a magnificent visual creation depicting the strange encounter between the first-person narrator, the author’s alter ego, and a gigantic being that is both a classic machine and living creature in the same body, “the lost thing”. The tension is already apparent. How can something so large and spectacular be lost? Almost invisible to most people, in fact. Could it symbolize its finder’s discovery of his own inner potential? A question that becomes more acute when the narrator takes “the lost thing” home to meet his family and his parents scarcely pay it any notice. The questions pile up in this way while Shaun Tan gives full expression to his register of art history and industrial history references. We encounter stories embedded within stories. The collage technique, with layer upon layer of information, means that each aspect invites closer examination, its own expedition of discovery. Shaun Tan explains: “All of these elements came together in the production of a visual narrative that is at once very simple and accessible, yet complex and irreducibly enigmatic, even for me … it wouldn’t work if I understood too much about it.” The Lost Thing has been adapted for the stage and made into a film, which won the Oscar for best animated short film at the 2011 Academy Awards.