F ING O K A M AND THE D ISL
TE
ISOLA
u hun M
ngc by Fe
“Comme si en ouvrant une porte, on y trouvait son double qui vous attend.”1 –– Bernard Faucon
1.As if, opening a door, you'd find your double awaiting you.
Fenchun Mu, also called as MSPRING, is a Chinese illustrator who is graduating from MICA, ILP MFA.
OVERVIEW My thesis, Isolated Island contains a picture book I have created for people who feel isolated in the city and want to escape from the realities of everyday life. It starts with a boy’s escape from his city, where his classmates bullied him. He finds a place by accident called Isolated Island. The islanders all have very painful and dark memories caused by their atypical but unique qualities. Through learning the stories of the people, the boy gradually has a profound understanding of himself and his unique qualities and learns to embrace them. I used visual metaphors to depict the world on Isolated Island. Stories of the islanders are dark and subtly brutal. Although this book may appear for young children, but it is really for the child in each of us who share the stories of the characters found here. For making my thsesis more appealing and complete, I also made a sculpture based scene which is related to the story.
EXPLORATION
City Forest micro picturebook 2013
I created a micro picture book called City Forest during Fall 2013. I drew five characters, and wrote a short story for each of them. The age, gender, and species of the characters vary. The only common point they share is that they all are experiencing isolation, which manifests as death, loneliness, weakness or strangeness. Creating this picture book gave me a chance to think about the possibility for making picturebooks. It encouraged me to write stories
different from traditional books. To me, this picturebook is like a prelude to my thesis story Isolated Island .
Fungi's Letters micro picturebook 2014
Fungi's Letters is another micro picture book I created for the publication project is Spring 2014. I continued exploring how to make original dark picture books. In this picture book, a mushroom who could walk travels and sees a lot of new scenery. But unfortunately, he could not remember the way back to his closest friend. He wrote thousands of letters, but non of them was sent to that friend. This story reflects my attitude towards the relationship between human beings. People
get attracted by new things easily, and also lose interest without effort. This reality inspired me to create this story. Crreating this picture books helps me realize that picture books are not only for children, additionally, I believe stories for children don't need to be positive. I want to challenge my old assumptions about picturebook, and keep trying new concepts.
RESEARCH picture books to complete my research. Although I hold the opinion that my main audiences are not children, I still enjoyed the process of finding inspiration and references in the outstanding picture books. Beegu (2003) by Alexis Deacon is a good example. Beegu is a creature from outer space. She is lemon yellow, cute and looks like a rabbit. One day, she accidentally landed on earth. She suddenly feel an urgent need to find friends in the city because of her loneliness, and she does find some friends–– puppies and children. Sadly adults allow their children to play with her. At night, Beegu feels increasingly lonely. Fortunately, her parents find her. Once on the space ship, they ask her how does she feel about earth. She replies thatsome of the creatures on earth are huge and scary, but some small ones are friendly, she will miss them. The story is touching and meaningful.
Over the summer of 2014, I had read the novels of Murakami Haruki, and they inspired me during he process of crafting my thesis. Murakami Haruki is very good at creating characters because of his unlimited imagination. He is also talented at integrating fantastic and bizarre elements into the seemingly realistic and cruel world in his novels. And for my thesis, I decided to fellow Murakami's direction, and make my thesis book into a fantasy-based project with a lot of different characters. In addition, I referred to certain children's
I appreciate that the author uses soft and even humorous way to describe it. It is not only a good education for children to understand acceptance and help, but also a good chance for adults to be introspecting themselves.
I know that many Northern European Illustrators of children's books don't avoid depicting proufound themes like death, fear, and lost. On the contrary, they prefer to create works based on these themes in a relatively comprehensive way that is good for children, and grow hope on their mind. This philosophy was important to me during my research, and I thought it was an appropriate direction for my thesis. Good examples are Jane, The Fox & Me (2013) by Isabelle Arsenault, Beautiful Darkness (2013) by Fabien Vehlmann.
The proposal for my thesis also included creating 3D objects to make my work more complete. By chance, I went to Yoshimoto Nara's exhibition Yogya Bington House Mini . It was exciting to see the great combination of his illustrations and installation. He built a real-sized green house, and blocked the door with wood sticks. Viewers can only observe the house through the windows or cracks between the boards. Despite the intentional viewing limitaitons, viewers can always find something fresh from different points of views. It inspired me deeply, and as a result I decided to build my own scene based on my story.
SKETCHES
"A boat came towards the little school boy from the middle of the lake." From Isolated Island watercolor on paper, 2014
I created numerous doodles and sketches before I started my thesis, just like a warmup before a competition. This was one of the most exciting parts. I was not restricted by anything. Experimenting and testing different materials and skills was the goal. I was so fascinated with using watercolor without lines. Using color, temperature and pictorial space, I let them to determine the edges of the elenments in my work. In
addition, thinking about media and materials when sketching made me look forward to drawing the final artwork as soon as possible. Making this book was hard but fun. Although I struggled with the skill and style at the beginning, I did find the process rewarding. Generally, a picture book should have a constant style among the cover, end pages, and inner pages, but I found it hard to let go of my original cover, which is slightly different
from the artwork inside of my book. I used a lot of materials, watercolor, color pencil, acrylic, gouache and pastel. I also experimented with combining of hand drawings and digital skill. Some of the textures were created manually and I used Photoshop to transfer them on my scanned art works to make the image look richer and have more layers.
A Boy Trapped by The Elves In Water Watercolor on paper, 2014
Sad, Lost Boy watercolor on paper, 2014
A Queen with An Annoying Look watercolor on paper, 2014
Kellas watercolor on paper, 2014
STORY ANALYSIS I started my picture book without having a very clear storyline at first, only knowing that I wanted to make a story about atypical people in society, a picture book not only for the market place, but most importantly for myself. The proposal was started with a psychiatry report I read last summer. In the report, a doctor documented his patients’ cases. There were two cases that impressed me the most. One was from a man with multipersonalities, he split his personality into three ones. Unusually they were brothers and a sister. Both of the brothers were cruel and aggressive, and the little sister was tender and timid. He changed his personalities often. One day, one of the brother personalities killed the other one, and slept in his mind. Then was in his sister's personality for a long time, and lived as a gay man, until he told his parter that his brother was going to kill his sister one day. After that, he became a normal straight guy again. After his conversation with the doctor, he commited suicide because he felt guilty about killing his two siblings. In another case, the patient could travel mentally. He was a philosophy professor. He told the doctor that he could travel to the edge of the universe, and showed the doctor how he could do it. He just sat on the bed and closed his eyes, after seconds he opened his eyes, and looked super refreshed, saying, “I have been there, the edge of the universe.” He talked very logically, and even made the doctor believe in his theory. Personally, I did not think their stories were only crazy. I sometimes believe people can travel around mentally as well as physically, like in their dreams. I have also drawn many
journeys in dreams. And I still assume that many people have multiple personalities, the reason why most of them are not diagnosed as mentally ill may be because some of the personalities are so weak that they can not be detected so apparently. Having read this report, I kept thinking about this assumption, and I considered whether I could make a picture book like a doctor’s report about his patients. Finally, I proposed Isolated Island. The island is like a hospital.
They think the picture book is not about the island. One of the reasons is that the story happens on an island called this name. The main character's name is the Little School boy, and his story is as long as the other islanders’ stories; their stories contribute to this picture book as a whole, so for me, it is hard to name this picture book after A Story/Journey/ Memory Of Somebody. It is a title worthy to be loved.
I don’t attempt to analyze or explain my story very clearly often. I want to give people space to imagine. However, readers are not activated to do this sometimes, and they frequently ask me questions like how the stories could happen; what I was thinking about when I created this story; why name the location Isolated Island, not a more specific name, etc. I think for my thesis book, the Making of Isolated Island, it is a good place and chance to explain the metaphors and symbols in my story. ABOUT THE TITLE ISOLATED ISLAND Why Isolated Island? This question has been raised to me the most frequently. I sometimes find it hard to answer, just like answering the question, “why your name is Spring?” In some situation, I think names are only a designation, which make the person easier to remember. Isolated Island, as it is read literally, is an island which is isolated from the real world. In addition, I like the visual look of this phrase — almost the same at first sight, but still slightly different. People also ask me this question from a different aspect: why Isolated Island, not The Story of The Little School Boy or so?
NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS Every character in this picture book was created originally by me. Thinking about their name was difficult. The names need to be either very specific, or very universal. I was trapped by this, and Whitney recommended that I could do some research on the mythologies from different countries in order to make this picture book diverse in its appeal.
BACKGROUND STORIES AND EXPLANATIONS OF THE VISUAL METAPHORS
The main character’s name is Little School Boy, it’s like naming your cat after “A Cute Kitty”. I struggled thinking if I should give him a specific name. Every character in this story has a name, even the very tiny creatures called Moomies. But giving a name to the main character just trapped me. I want him to be more universal so that my readers could more easily related to him. I was also influenced by the world-famous fairy tale The Little Prince, one of my favorite books, which is about a boy, the Little Prince, who travels from different planets and hears different characters’ stories. This unnamed character has touched millions of people. Naming my character the Little School Boy pays homage to this classic fairy tale. For the other characters, some of their names are developed from mythologies over the world. To get greater range, I told my foreigner friends about my characters’ stories, and asked them how would they name my characters, which allowed me to device new names I have never heard before. Some characters' name are cute to pronounce (like Moomie). Finding a cool name was hard, but the result satisfied me.
In this picture book, I created 12 islanders (including Moomie). They are all different from each other, and from other normal human beings. However, they are not as simple as they look. Most of them resemble the personalities deep in our minds, personalities those people are afraid of. They are also like a period of specific memory people avoid mentioning as time goes by. Later, in this explanation I will give some clues of their real representations. The Little School Boy And Kellas The Little School Boy has the most subtle feeling of existence in this picture book. He was innocent, and knew nothing about the real world, but he was rejected by a negative side of it. When creating this story, I did not want to have a hero, who dares to fight against his enemies. The Little School Boy was small, timid and shy, his only recourse is to escape. Once on the Island, he behaved quitely for a long time but he was not a coward. Although he was speechless for most of the situations, he kept thinking and learning for the other islanders’ stories. He knows how to love people, and he is willing to accept them with their uniqueness. The Little School Boy is like the child in my heart. I love and respect him. I will never abandon him.
Kellas is a mysterious young man who can transfer himself in to big velvet blue cat. He is free, smart and ready to help. He is not trapped in the buildings on Isolated Island, instead, he knows every islander’s story. He is like a guide to everyone who are sent, or has chosen to land on Isolated Island. He gave the Little School Boy an especially warm and friendly welcome, which made the Little School Boy comfortable and trusting. I am a cat lover, and Kellas was the first character I sketched out. His name is based on a Scotland elf, Cait Sith, who is considered the king of cats. In the legend, Cait Sith is a very smart elf who could walk with two feet and speak the human’s language. He always wears fancy clothes,. Scottish people also call him Kellas. The Doll Anisidora The Little School Boy got the doll Anisidora in the real world. She wore pretty blue tutu, and attracted the Little School Boy the moment he saw her. The Little School Boy kicked her into the lake because he thought that it was her fault that he was bullied. The moment Anisidora sank in the lake, a boat to Isolated Island came to the Little School Boy. Anisidora is one of the keys that opens the door to Isolated Island. She is also a symbol of the unique qualities of the Little School Boy. On
the surface this may appear to merely be about a boy playing with dolls. But it is actually about the courage to love something beautiful yet controversial.
represents revenge, and saying goodbye to an unsatisfying past. Asuri is based on an Indian god, Asura. In Hinduism, the asuras are a group of power-seeking deities related to the more benevolent devas. They are sometimes considered nature spirits. Asuras are constantly envious and fighting. Distruction is their favorite past-time.
me or wanted to listen to me. Dingin used an extreme way to stop talking, but I finally have learned how to talk in another language. As a character Asking my fellow gradnate students for feedback on these names also helped me make connections between myself and others, he is warm-hearted, n a real world that occasionally is not. Dingin’s name means quiet, speechless in Turkish.
Dingin
The Whale, Kuong
Anisidora is another name of Pandora in Greek mythology. Pandora also represents being beautiful yet controversial. The name Anisidora also means “a she, who gives gift to you”. Having the doll made the Little School Boy be bullied by his classmates, but the doll gave him a chance to escape, also a chance to embrace his true self.
Kuong used to live in a palace. She is huge; Her height is 10 times more than the Little School Boy's, however, regardless of her size, she is pretty. She smokes a lot and she was very sentimental. In the real world, she was a manager in a very big company. Everybody thought that she was very successful, but she never felt happy no matter how much money she had made, how many projects she had done. So she came to Isolated Island. sadly,it did not help her much. and in the end, she became a transparent whale and her former self disappeared.
Asuri
Asuri thinks that she is the Queen on the Isolated Island. In real world, she was a school girl who was also bullied by her classmates because she stood out too much. She made a poisoned cherry and put it into the lunchbox of the one classmate who bullied her the most, and then she escaped to Isolated Island. She
Dingin used to be very talkative. He read a lot and he was really very considerate. yet, no one listened to him, not even a word. He was ignored all the time. One day, he was fed up with his existence. So he sewed his mouth closed and started to concentrate on drawing his stories. Dingin gets nutrition from liquid food. I am a slightly similar to this character. especially when I firstly came to America, I wanted to communicate with people from different countries and culture background around me, yet I always made mistakes –– wrong timing, bad words, all the time. It was frustratng when if no one could understand
Kuong used to live in a palace. She is huge; her height is 10 times more than the Little School Boy's. However, regardless of her size, she is pretty. She smoked a lot and she was
very sentimental. In the real world, she was a manager in a very big company. Everybody thought that she was very successful. But she never felt happy no matter how much money she had made, how many projects she had done. So she came to Isolated Island. However, it did not help her much. Finally, she became a transparent whale and disappeared. In the book City Forest I made for my first year, I wrote a short story of a whale:
Whale, Kuong at this key moment. Through tasting Kuong tear, the Little School Boy had got a synaesthetic understanding of the whale’s memory, and started to think about his existence and true self.
only goes to Halloween parties because his skin is colorful. Nobody on Isolated Island knows how he really looks like. He always wanders around in his room, sometimes even floats! It was said that he would glow after the rainy days, like rainbow. Ghost Boy represents the homosexual people who dare not to be out.
Moomies
I am the only whale who gets lost in the city forest. No friend and no one can hear my voice. The frequency of my voice is too rare. Can you here me? SOS!
Whales are very mysterious creatures to me. They are huge, and they swim in the sea alone like flying in the sky. I sometimes imagine what will happen if a whale feels lonely? Will they cry because the loneliness? They must have got large drops of tears. If they are in the sea, the other creatures could not taste the tears, because the sea is salty. But what if the whale flies in the sky? A whale became larger and larger, lighter and lighter because of the isolation, and finally, it cried flying to the sky — this is the reason why I arrange the
Moomie is a very mysterious creature that only exists on Isolated Island. There are lots of them. They are normal and insignificant. At first, I designed them as a creature that all of them are similar to each other. They act in the smiler way and same rhythm. They are just like the ordinary, boring, and unromantic people in the city. But later, I was thinking, maybe everybody is interesting and attractive in their own way, nobody should be regarded completely boring; for this reason, I changed the design a little. Moomies are not annoying and boring creatures any more, they have costumes, the desgin of them is cuter. Now they are like a symbol of Isolated Island. Other Characters Except for these characters whose story are told in their own ways, I also have characters back of the windows whose stories are not told in the real book. Like Ghost Boy. Ghost Boy
Some of the characters are attract because of their looks. Hat Collector is one of my favorite. Hat collector loves hats. He looks very young because he is short. But actually, he is almost 50 years old.There was a legend that he cut the other creatures heads to make them into hats. Also, people think that he wears this amount of hats because he wants to hide his shortcoming of his height. Except for thinking about the story of my character, I also like design the look of them. Hat Collector just satisfied me who is magpie.
ABOUT THE ENDING OF THE STORY As readers could see from the last page, the Little School Boy took off his clothes, and sank himself down the bath tub. The surrounding was warm and soft, very different from the front pages. Around the corner was the doll, and he was reaching his hand to her. The story ends abruptly here. Some of my audiences could not accept this, they want this story to have a more accurate ending, like the boy left Isolated Island with the doll holding in his hand, or the any other positive endings. I really appreciated that they considered so much for my story. But I could not take the suggestions because I intended to arrange this ending here.
After all, Asian culture is so different from American culture. At least for me, the stories I have get touched love to create an ambiguous feeling for the important moments. I read lots of Chinese and Japanese literature that does not make me feel enough. At first I could not accept it, but gradually, I have been enjoying it. In this way, I could imagine the future of the character, the later part of the story. And I also learnt to write story and illustrate in this way. I love my story be subtle and ambiguous. Talking back to the ending of this picture book, actually I want to give my audiences the power to make discussion for the Little
School Boy. As it is seen on the page, the Little School Boy does not actually touch the doll, he just saw her. Audiences could choose if he is going to touch her and embrace her; if the answer is yes, the Little School Boy would get the courage to embrace his true self and go back to the real world with being proud of his unique quality; if occasionally, my audience feels it might be to hard for the Little School Boy to survive in the real world, or he/she thinks changing is a better solution, the answer could be no, and the Little School Boy will not reach the doll, the smile on his face means that he wants to change, or he feels that Isolated Island is just the right, cozy home for him. The ending really depends how do my audiences think about the story, my characters.
FINAL BOOK
Isolated Island watercolor, acrylic, colorpencil, and digital. 12inches'' 44 pages 2014-2015
Making this book was hard but fun. As for the final arts in the book, I was so struggling with the skill and style at the beginning. Because generally, a picture book should have a constant style among the cover, end pages, and inner pages, but I found it hard to say no the the cover, which is slightly different from the artworks inside of my book. I used a lot of materials, watercolor, color pencil, acrylic, gauche and pastel. Also I experimented the combination of hand drawings and digital skill. I created textures manually and used photoshop to transfer them on my scanned art works to make the images look richer, and have more layers.
This is also an interactive picture book, I designed the windows, printed them and cut them out, glued glass paper at the back of them, and finally put them in the book. Readers can open them, play with the shadows and light, also have a feeling of peeking the islanders.
SCULPTURE
I took Figure Sculpture to prepare for making my sculpture based scene. Although making figure sculpture is so different from making my characters, the process made me get a better understanding of the material, so that I could mold more skillfully. The material and tools I used for my sculpture were vivid doll skin tone sculpey, wool felt, also wires for making the amateur. My goal was to build a scene, and I started with drawing it. After roughly measuring the size of my characters, I built the amateurs with wires, put sponge on them to make it easy to felt. I used sculpey to make my characters’ head and body parts, and painted the faces with acrylic. Also I used wool felt to make the hair. I bought the water scene kit to build the pond, whichx has my little creature Moomie swimming in it.
EXHIBITION
Special thanks to: MICA Whitney Sherman and Jamie Zollars my classmates and friends and the future that always gives me suprise
Fengchun Mu
" 我爱你，再见。"
All rights reserved Š Fengchun Mu 2015 contact mspringer@yeah.net mspringthing.com