Shaun Tan. Award Laureate 2011 1
The Red Tree (2001) is built around the tendency
of children and adults to describe their feelings using metaphors such as monsters, storms, sunshine and rainbows. In The Red Tree, Shaun Tan wanted to go beyond the clichés. Through painted images, he explores the expressive potential of these shared fantasies. Initially, Shaun Tan says, he had also intended to portray positive emotions, but as his work progressed he discovered that “the negative emotions – particularly feelings of loneliness and depression – were just much more interesting from both a personal and artistic point of view.” In dazzlingly beautiful images, with minimal text and no action in the conventional sense, the book tells the story of a frail little girl who, on her travels, finds herself in a variety of rather frightening existential conditions and moods before discovering, on her return home, a symbol of hope: the little red tree growing in her bedroom. With its wealth of associations, this open narrative accommodates many possibilities for identification and interpretation that invite readers to create new stories of their own. The book has been adapted for the stage and used therapeutically to empower seriously ill children and adults to verbalize their emotions. Shaun Tan’s most critically acclaimed and innovative book, The Arrival (2006), is a complex, completely wordless graphic novel and a unique, epic work in every sense. In it, Shaun Tan expands on an autobiographical theme to which he frequently returns: being different, not fitting in, finding yourself on strange, precarious territory. Symbolizing the autobiographical nature of the experience described, he used his own face on the protagonist. The Arrival is about an emigrant family. The father moves to a new country, where he is eventually reunited with his family after a long separation. The magical realism of which Shaun Tan is so fond permeates the entire work. The book takes the form of a well-worn photograph album with slightly sepia-toned pages filled with drawings in black and white. The external structure is tightly defined: departure, arrival, frightening foreign encounters, adapting, reuniting. The naturalistic surface is broken by the magic of the images, in which fantastic creations – unfamiliar animals and strange buildings – are mixed with familiar elements. This technique creates powerful mental images, an empathy on the part of the reader with an immigrant’s vulnerability. The reader is drawn into the drama that results when someone completely lacks the words to express the true implications of an encounter with a new, incomprehensible and alien world. The signs are written in characters that no-one can decipher.