Adding color to tales of the past
New approach sees book creators adapt ancient techniques to tell stories with a modern twist, Mei Jia reports.
Chinese culture provides a rich seam of inspiration. Tales from the past have inspired generations. But to make them even more appealing, a group of seven picture book creators, with an average age of 25, are giving ancient tales a modern makeover.
With their mentor Mou Aili, associate professor at the School of Animation with Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, they have turned their graduating works into a collection of seven picture books on the theme of ancient Chinese legends.
The collection, entitled Interesting Chinese Mythology, was published by China Citic Press in May, and has been hailed by both critics and readers as “something original and fresh”. So far, more than 6,000 copies of the collection have been sold.
The seven creators of the picture books have won much acclaim as a result, so much so that Chongqing Library is to hold a monthlong exhibition dedicated to the collection in August.
The collection is like a package of art lessons, as “it is presented in seven individual visual languages”, says Mou, 39, who’s also the author of the text in all seven of the books. “It’s interesting to see how these young illustrators combine the ancient with the modern, and Chinese aesthetics with internationalized expressions, and above all, how they view and make use of tradition.”
Among the seven books, each telling one mythical tale, it is the first time for three of the stories to be recounted in such a format. These include tales from two ethnic groups — The Yangque Bird Creating Sun and Moon from the Miao and White Feathered Flying Suit from the
Dongxiang.
Editor of the collection Yu Zhixiao says she’s impressed by their powerful creations, while Zeng Zirong, an art publisher, writer and head of Citic Art Museum, says that if the collection is introduced to global publishers on book fairs in Frankfurt and London, it may “get good results”.
However, when these young creators first heard from their mentor that picture-book creation had been chosen as the focus of their graduation work, some of them, such as Xiao Peirou, were initially a bit perturbed at its seemingly “insignificant” nature, thinking of it as being a little childish.
But the more she researched, the happier she became, as she found that since good quality Chinese mythology picture books were rare, “there was still much room to improve and new trails to blaze”.
Xiao and other graduates, under the guidance of Mou, began exploring different approaches and experimented with a variety of mediums and techniques.
One such approach, novel to the genre, the team took was to transform human characters into anthropomorphic animals, as was suggested by Mou.
Landscapes with light
For instance, in A Deer of Nine
Colors, painted by Xiao, the ungrateful villain is portrayed as a red fox, while the queen who covets the deer’s fur is illustrated as a peacock.
To draw in young readers, Mou wrote this story “in rhymed stanzas” hoping, when it is read aloud, it will have an effect similar to rapping.
In the same book, the team made another bold choice — applying jinbi
shanshui (“gold-bluish green landscape”), a classic style of Chinese ink painting that uses gold, green and cyan as the three major colors.
Moreover, Xiao extended the paper-based ink painting to the digital world, combining it with new elements. She added a stereoscopic touch of light to the ancient visual effects via Photoshop, and images of the fairylike deer galloping in the green hills, bathed in the sunlight, came to life.
It was a long process of trial and error to achieve the best effect, and she even sacrificed precious sleeping hours working on it. “I took about three days to complete a double-page spread. If I felt gripped by inspiration, I saw sleep as a waste of time. I just wanted to keep on drawing without any distraction,” Xiao says.
Her effort paid dividends. Her artworks have been shortlisted in the cartoon category for the 13th National Exhibition of Fine Arts, sponsored by the China Artists Association, and exhibited last year among more than 1,000 creations in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, an honor for a fresh graduate.
Xiao felt even more delight when she met crowds of preschool kids and primary school students who came to see the exhibition of graduation works at her school, which was held last year and where her creations were also on display.
Upon hearing them raise many questions and commenting on her work with passion, she felt a great sense of fulfillment.
“At that time I suddenly realized I was doing something great — that, with the good work I presented, I have planted a seed of art appreciation in the young hearts of our future generation,” she says.
To empower herself more, she has collected more than 100,000 digital artworks to use as sources of inspiration for future projects.
Rock with burning fire
Another graduate, Qiu Fangxu, can’t remember how many silver foils he ruined while ironing them with sulfur to get the ideal mixture of color he wanted for the picture book, The Magic Dragon and the Herbal Medicines.
“The speed, the pressure applied and even my breathing mattered a lot, because the foils are so light and thin. I spent seven whole days last year, repeatedly ‘burning’ the silver,” says Qiu, who applied another unique technique, yancaihua (meaning “rock color painting”), by “learning while experimenting and practicing” countless times.
It was a lost art form in China for over 1,000 years. Using mineral pigments made from rock and earth, it colored the murals in the grottoes of Dunhuang, Gansu province. Its heyday was during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), but it lost its appeal during the Song and Yuan dynasties (960-1368) as Chinese artists adopted ink as their preferred medium, according to Wang Xiongfei, head of the Rock Painting Research Center at the China Academy of Art.
It is only in recent decades that artists have rediscovered its charm and revived the technique. The glittering particles, the wild colors and the layers of texture are what drew Qiu and his peers to it.
Some of the colors are actually powdered gemstones. “Dozens of grams of such colors would cost me hundreds of yuan, and only cover a small patch of the painting,” he says, who bought all his materials himself.
A student of ink painting, Qiu felt an “emotional bond” with these traditional colors, so it was natural for him to apply them to his work, a tale about Shennong, one of the three great emperors of myth who is said to have been first to develop agriculture and herbal medicines.
The tale is based on a well-known myth, Shennong Tastes a Hundred
Herbs, so at first he feared that he would struggle to create something original. To solve the problem, the human emperor Shennong is portrayed as a magic dragon (shenlong in Chinese). The success of the transformation lies in the fact that the pronunciation of the two names sounds similar in many southern dialects.
Mou offered the Magic Dragon a coming-of-age character arc. In the tale, the dragon overcomes setbacks to grow into glorious maturity and finally soar.
“The cool idea of the image transformation sparked my passion and desire, and I believe young readers will love it as much as I did,” Qiu says.
Lessons of remixing
Mou keeps drawing inspiration from Chinese cultural traditions, and believes “careful plans and smart thinking are the ways to help revive traditions and attract modern readers”.
Mou has been teaching for over a decade, after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in drama literature and a PhD in theater and Chinese traditional opera from the Central Academy of Drama, and her master’s degree from Sydney University. She has noticed that more students have begun to embrace guofeng or guochao, meaning Chinese-style trends, spurred on by both mainstream entertainment and social media platforms. “As our society gets wealthier, it’s natural that Chinese youths have reclaimed greater pride and confidence in their own cultural roots,” Mou says.
Picture books have long been a personal interest, she adds, and since her baby girl’s birth early last year, she became even more interested in original picture books, “especially those that nurture Chinese aesthetics”.
Mou encourages her students not to merely repeat ancient artistic expressions, but to try and find something new.
Imagination is key. Liang Yuan, creator of A Carp Leaping the Dragon Gate, had similar fear as Qiu did with his old tale. Luckily, she followed Mou’s suggestion to depict ocean waves using “traditional patterns like cirrus clouds”, which gave her a new outlet to demonstrate her skills.
In The Yangque Bird Creating Sun and Moon, Zhang Yuting married Art Deco patterns with images of a phoenix, while in White Feathered Flying Suit, Zhang Xinyu adapted gongbi paintings, a classic Chinese style employing meticulous brush strokes, to provide the elaborate backgrounds for her Tang-Dynastyera characters. Her blending of classy and cute made the Dongxiang story “fun fodder” for young readers.
In another tale, about a rabbit trying to scoop the reflection of the moon out of some water with lotus leaves, Wang Meiling chose drawing the figures and backgrounds, cut them out and recorded their movements on film to achieve a 3D effect. And, for the well-known tale,
Yugong Moves the Mountain, Zhou Lan depicts the protagonist as a turtle instead of an old man.
All her figures and settings are fashioned from cloth and employ traditional Chinese dyeing and weaving skills. She says it took five months to finish the 20 paintings of cloth art, adding: “I hope to show younger readers more dimensions to traditional Chinese arts, such as handicrafts.”
Curator Zeng says it’s important for artists to keep an open mind and create stylish books that adapt ancient Chinese culture with a modern appeal. “As artists feel more confident in their national heritage, they can keep one foot in their tradition, while the other advances onto the modern world stage,” Zeng says.