Shaun Tan. Award Laureate 2011 1
The Arrival is a mammoth book project that took f
ive years to bring to fruition. It leaves no reader unmoved. Shaun Tan’s determination to never compromise on his vision is present throughout the book. A deeply humanistic tone, very typical of Shaun Tan, resonates through this wordless world. In his latest book, the anthology Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008), Shaun Tan relates 15 stories from his upbringing in the suburbs – a place often characterized, according to Shaun Tan, as banal, mundane and even boring. “Yet I think it is also a fine substitute for the medieval forests of fairytale lore, a place of subconscious imaginings. I’ve always found the idea of suburban fantasy very appealing”, he says, setting out the notion of the double life of the suburbs: a visible life that is often somewhat ridiculed, and an invisible, secret life. The book is inventive and shows genuine delight in storytelling. It is almost a collection of urban legends, with stories arising out of apparently trivial, everyday happenings. In this work, Shaun Tan has written longer texts in the voice of a universal narrator and combined them with lavish illustrations, whose character alters from one story to the next. He unleashes his full repertoire of artistic expression: lead pencil, Indian ink, coloured pencil, painting with various media, various print techniques and – as in all his books – an astonishingly rich artistic treatment of every part of the book, right down to the copyright notice and credits, the table of contents and the ISBN number. This is great book art, a key component of Shaun Tan’s ability to create visually spectacular pictorial narratives with a constant human presence.