Dec
13
The Arrival
Filed Under Visual Art |
Browsing through the “Notable Children’s Books of 2007″ on the NY Times site, I was floored by this image taken from a book called The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Perhaps I’m late in discovering his work; the reviewer called the book more of a graphic novel than a children’s picture book. Curious, I went to the book store to see for myself. Found it in the graphic novel section, completely dissed: a single slim copy buried between gargantuan Marvel and DC compendiums on the top shelf. Took the book and read it in about twenty minutes, mesmerized. Probably the best twenty minutes of my past week. I was too cheap to buy it at full price, so it’s on my Amazon wish list. But all told, it’s one of my favorite books this year.
The Arrival is completely wordless. It tells the story of a nameless immigrant, who looks Asian one moment, European the next. He leaves his family back in the old country to settle in the new country. One might presume the new country is America, as the port that the immigrant comes through is vaguely reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century Ellis Island. But if the new country is America, it is in its opaque, allegorical disguise (let’s call it Amerika.) As a matter of fact, aside from the people themselves, who are rendered in precise physical and emotional realism by Tan, everything else is allegorical, as if taken from a dream or a myth. Even the hieroglyphic script - which is beautiful but illegible, printed everywhere - is invented by Tan, forever indecipherable.
The strongest part of the book, for me, was the first half of it. Estranged from his old country and way of life, the immigrant struggles to find work, and pines for his wife and daughter in the new land. It’s possible that I found a more personal kind of emotional resonance here, as my father came to the states a year before us; reading The Arrival, I could easily imagine my father’s hardship and loneliness. But in the images above, see how subtly the images in the montage panes on the left transmogrify into their alien counterparts on the right. Throughout the book, the narrative moves through arresting and elliptical sequences of images; many of you will be reminded of Chris Ware’s poetic way of distilling ephemeral moments into images, memorializing the present fleeting into the past in the process.
There are many moments in The Arrival that will convince you that what Tan has accomplished is just great art. It’s a free and inventive work, immaculately designed and composed. Strange creatures and enigmatic symbology, along with Tan’s consummate but peculiar logic in arranging the book’s images into a compelling narrative called into my mind both Hieronymus Bosch and Kafka. The surreal design of the new country and its architecture, though, made me think of Brodsky and Utkin the most.
Brodsky and Utkin are Russian architects who were called “paper architects” during the Soviet years because they were avant-garde architects whose style remained radical, even after the Socialist Realist style was denounced as “over-decorated” by Khruschev in the ’50s and abandoned. Brodsky and Utkin, though, continued to produce a series of whimsical architectural etchings. They were influenced by the cosmopolitan architecture of the past (i.e. Byzantine, Egyptian) as well as the post-modern concept of the city. As a result, their work seems both utopian and dystopic at once. (I don’t think they work together any more as artists; each of them is a practicing architect.) Anyway, their etchings are usually accompanied by equally whimsical texts written by the artists. (My favorite is “Villa Claustrophobia,” clearly influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which I have no reason to insert into this post; please check their small but fascinating body of work in a book published by Princeton Architectural Press.) The work above is called “The Crystal Palace,” and its accompanying texts - a haiku by Basho and the artists’ description - could very well describe the strange land which the immigrant in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival must adopt and call home:
Seaweed swarms with
Transparent [minnows] Catch them -
They shall thaw without a trace.Basho
Crystal Palace is a beautiful but unrealizable
dream[,] a Mirage which calls you always[,] seen
a the edge of [the] visible. But as each dream [is seen] in
close examination[,] it will prove the other thing
than it seemed [from] afar. [It stands on the edge of the city.] A person who wants to
visit it will make a long way through the town
borderland, blocks of slums and dumps but co
ming at last to the Palace find neither roof nor
walls - only the huge glass plates, stuck into the
huge box of sand. A Mirage remains simply
a Mirage, though it can be touched. Passing
from one glass chink to another, a visitor will
walk [through] the Palace… and find himself at
the border of a small square, where the Landscape
commences… Did he learn the very essence of the Crys-
tal Palace[ W]ill he have a desire to visit it once more
Nobody knows…
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