Interview on “Original Picture Book Reading and Masterpieces” (Part 3)

Intro­duc­tion: This is an inter­view pod­cast con­duct­ed on “Pic­ture Book Lol­lipop”, host­ed by Xiaox­i­ang and guest Ajia. Start­ing from the ref­er­ence book “Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books: Select­ed Read­ings and High­lights” pub­lished at the end of 2024, an in-depth con­ver­sa­tion was held around the selec­tion cri­te­ria, his­tor­i­cal con­text, cur­rent themes and future devel­op­ment of orig­i­nal pic­ture books. The record­ing time is on the evening of Jan­u­ary 3, 2025, and the broad­cast time is Jan­u­ary 17, 2025.

The fol­low­ing text is com­piled as an excerpt. To lis­ten to the full pod­cast, please click the fol­low­ing audio link:

Himalaya:38 Dia­logue with Teacher Ajia: Has the Spring of Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books Arrived?Pic­ture Book Lol­lipopFree online read­ing, lis­ten­ing and down­load­ing— Himalayas

Micro­cosm:http://t.cn/A6uDFbvy

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Part 3

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Every­one thinks that this book (“The Radish is Back”) is a long-stand­ing folk tale, but in fact it is an orig­i­nal work by a Chi­nese writer in 1955, and it is adapt­ed from a sto­ry about “The Bat­tle of Shang­gan­ling” dur­ing the War to Resist U.S. Aggres­sion and Aid Korea.

Xiaox­i­ang:

Yes, I also learned about this after read­ing your book. It’s real­ly amaz­ing!

I also remem­ber that at the Shang­hai Chil­dren’s Book Fair last year, I inter­viewed Mr. Ye Jun­liang from the French Hongfei Pub­lish­ing House. He men­tioned that they also pub­lished this book “The Return of Radish” in France, and the illus­tra­tor was the French girl Clemence Pol­let who drew the French ver­sion of “Mulan”. Her illus­tra­tions are very con­sis­tent with the con­tem­po­rary aes­thet­ic style. So I think this sto­ry is real­ly mag­i­cal. ​

Then I think we can talk about some fur­ther top­ics.

For exam­ple, in the first part of your book, after intro­duc­ing the def­i­n­i­tion and devel­op­ment of orig­i­nal pic­ture books, you spent a lot of space talk­ing about the char­ac­ter­is­tics of orig­i­nal pic­ture books. I think this area is par­tic­u­lar­ly worth explor­ing in depth. You put for­ward some key­words, such as “unique col­ors”, “Chi­nese sto­ry ele­ments”, “local cus­toms”, “tra­di­tion­al cul­ture”, “philo­soph­i­cal thoughts”, etc.

I would like to ask you to talk about this part. You men­tioned at the begin­ning that Chi­nese orig­i­nal pic­ture books have a spe­cial “col­or”. In fact, we did­n’t seem to pay much atten­tion to this before. ​

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You also specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned in your book that the use of col­ors in orig­i­nal Chi­nese pic­ture books actu­al­ly has two cul­tur­al sources: one is literati ink paint­ing, which is rel­a­tive­ly fresh and ele­gant, with a literati tem­pera­ment; the oth­er is the live­ly, folk col­or expres­sion.

Could you please elab­o­rate on this top­ic? It is about the use of col­ors in orig­i­nal Chi­nese pic­ture books and the cul­tur­al ori­gins reflect­ed by these col­ors.

Ajia:

This is a good ques­tion. But I would like to say a few more words about the top­ic that I did not ful­ly dis­cuss before.

Why did my book end in 2000? The part before that, includ­ing the col­or you men­tioned, may be imme­di­ate­ly clear if you know pic­ture books before 2000. I did not expand on this part because the infor­ma­tion is not suf­fi­cient. But the “100 Years, 100 Books” series men­tioned above, in fact, many are reprints of old books col­lect­ed by Teacher Wang Zhi­geng.

How­ev­er, for exam­ple, there are some dif­fer­ences between “The Return of Radish” and the first ver­sion pub­lished in 1955. For exam­ple, from the per­spec­tive of pic­ture nar­ra­tive, the read­ing direc­tion was not com­plete­ly from left to right. The direc­tion of trav­el at that time was more ran­dom, some­times from left to right, some­times from right to left, for the con­ve­nience of arrange­ment and also con­sid­er­ing print­ing costs.

You know, we now gen­er­al­ly believe that going from left to right is for­ward, and going from right to left is back­ward, which is our com­mon nar­ra­tive gram­mar. But in the 1950s, these were not very impor­tant, so the new ver­sion you see now is actu­al­ly a re-arrange­ment, not exact­ly the orig­i­nal one.

There was con­tro­ver­sy at the time, and some edi­tors believed that since it was a repli­ca, it should be kept in its orig­i­nal state to have archival val­ue. How­ev­er, most edi­tors still felt that some adjust­ments should be made to respect the read­ing habits and inter­ests of con­tem­po­rary and future chil­dren.

So the text and lay­out of the ver­sion you are see­ing now have actu­al­ly been mod­i­fied.

But I think this is very impor­tant:

Why are we still will­ing to pre­serve and repro­duce Chi­na’s ear­ly orig­i­nal pic­ture books?

Because they are real­ly beau­ti­ful, the illus­tra­tions are real­ly beau­ti­ful. ​

​The cre­ators of that era often had a very deep foun­da­tion in Chi­nese stud­ies and tra­di­tion­al art, and many of them were mul­ti-tal­ent­ed. For exam­ple, Mr. Yan Gefan, the illus­tra­tor of “The Car­rot is Back”, is actu­al­ly a musi­cian. His fam­i­ly is first-rate in ani­ma­tion, music, and art. It is hard to imag­ine now that an illus­tra­tor of a pic­ture book can be a play­wright, ani­ma­tion direc­tor, musi­cian, and artist at the same time, but it was not uncom­mon in that era.

On the one hand, they can draw fairy tales and learn West­ern tech­niques, and on the oth­er hand, they have a very strong foun­da­tion in tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese art. Whether they are draw­ing tra­di­tion­al sto­ries or chil­dren’s sto­ries, the style of their works is some­times very ele­gant, with a strong literati col­or; some­times they are par­tic­u­lar­ly fes­tive, inte­grat­ing a lot of folk art ele­ments.

In fact, if you study the devel­op­ment of Chi­nese con­tem­po­rary art, you will find that artists like Lin Feng­mi­an, Zao Wou-Ki and Wu Guanzhong have all drawn a lot of nour­ish­ment from Chi­nese folk art. They have com­bined con­tem­po­rary art and tra­di­tion­al folk art very well.

The pic­ture book illus­tra­tors who were at the fore­front of the times often pos­sessed two qual­i­ties at the same time:

They can cre­ate paint­ings with a very lit­er­ary tem­pera­ment, and can also absorb very rich folk cre­ative resources. But they are not the kind of “copy­ing” you see in folk paint­ings. ​

Let me give you an exam­ple. Take for exam­ple the book “Deng­deng­deng” by Wang Zumin, which recent­ly won the Bologna Illus­tra­tion Award. You see, it has a folk fla­vor, right? But it is also a work with mod­ern artis­tic inter­est.

Xiaox­i­ang:

Yes, so it won the award in Bologna. The West­ern judges also men­tioned the “style of West­ern con­tem­po­rary art” in their com­ments, which we thought was quite strange at the time.

Ajia:

Yes, but in fact you will find that it is actu­al­ly an exten­sion of the school of Lin Feng­mi­an.

For exam­ple, Zhu Chengliang’s paint­ing “Don’t Let the Sun Fall” looks very folk, but in fact it also incor­po­rates the expres­sion of con­tem­po­rary art. Zhu Chengliang was the edi­tor of “Folk Art” at the time and was deeply influ­enced by the edi­tor-in-chief, Ke Ming, who was a stu­dent of Lin Feng­mi­an.

There is also Teacher Cai Gao — on the one hand, she is good at paint­ing very literati things, the most typ­i­cal exam­ple is the blank space in “The Sto­ry of Peach Blos­som Spring”, which itself has a free­hand style. But if you look close­ly, you will find that her col­ors and shapes are actu­al­ly also very char­ac­ter­is­tic of folk paint­ings. ​

​​Espe­cial­ly her “Mulan”, that kind of beau­ty, that kind of taste, and the deep earthy smell, as well as the sym­bol­ic expres­sion, I think it is very good. I per­son­al­ly like her “Meng Jiangnu Cry­ing at the Great Wall”, the col­ors are very sym­bol­ic, it can’t be said to be pure­ly folk, but you can real­ly feel the folk mean­ing.

I would like to empha­size that the artis­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics of Chi­nese orig­i­nal pic­ture books can be felt very intu­itive­ly in terms of col­or. You can tell at a glance that some works are Chi­nese.

For exam­ple, when Zhu Chengliang’s Don’t Let the Sun Fall was just pub­lished, it hap­pened to be the Shang­hai Book Fair, and I showed it to Mr. Mar­cus from the Unit­ed States. As soon as he opened it, he said that the book looked “very Chi­nese”, very Chi­nese.

But what’s inter­est­ing is that although he couldn’t read Chi­nese char­ac­ters, he could imme­di­ate­ly under­stand what sto­ry the pic­tures were telling. This shows that the visu­al nar­ra­tive of this book is actu­al­ly very “West­ern”. To some extent, it has absorbed a lot of the fun of nar­ra­tive in West­ern pic­ture books. ​

For exam­ple, the sun ris­es from a cer­tain posi­tion in the pic­ture, moves to anoth­er posi­tion at noon, and final­ly sets. The change of the height of the sun in the pic­ture shows the advance­ment of time — this is actu­al­ly a com­mon nar­ra­tive method of time and space in West­ern pic­ture books.

For exam­ple, there is a scene where we are stand­ing in a cave and look­ing out, stand­ing behind the ani­mals in the sto­ry, and look­ing at the scenery they are look­ing out. This kind of “per­son involved per­spec­tive” actu­al­ly appeared in “The Tale of Peter Rab­bit”. This is not the way of expres­sion in our tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese visu­al art, but the gram­mar of West­ern pic­ture book nar­ra­tive. ​

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But its col­ors are com­plete­ly tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese col­ors.

I think these cre­ators are real­ly amaz­ing. They have found a very good bal­ance between “tra­di­tion” and “moder­ni­ty”, “East” and “West”.

Xiaox­i­ang:

Do you think that the use of col­ors, which is influ­enced by Chi­nese tra­di­tion — whether it is literati paint­ing or folk art — will con­tin­ue as a trend among the new gen­er­a­tion of orig­i­nal pic­ture book cre­ators, or is there some changes tak­ing place?

Ajia:

I think there may be a gap at some stage.

For exam­ple, I once gave a lec­ture in Wen­zhou, shar­ing Cai Gao’s “Meng Jiangnu Weep­ing at the Great Wall”, and Tian Yu was also present at the time. When I talked about the col­ors of this book, he was very shocked. He did­n’t expect that there was such a strong expres­sive inten­tion behind those col­ors. ​

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For exam­ple, the col­or of “water” in the book is emer­ald green. In the eyes of Mr. Cai Gao, it is the col­or of “jade”, which sym­bol­izes the integri­ty and integri­ty of “rather be bro­ken into pieces than live in husks”. The col­ors of the objects in the paint­ing actu­al­ly con­vey the char­ac­ter of the peo­ple. This is the spir­i­tu­al essence of “using objects to express ideas” in our tra­di­tion­al literati paint­ings.

Tian Yu and his gen­er­a­tion of cre­ators may not have been par­tic­u­lar­ly aware of these things at the begin­ning. They may not have con­sid­ered the sym­bol­ic col­ors as the main cre­ative ele­ments. They are more con­cerned with the shape itself, and pre­fer styles with a bit of car­toon fun and action per­for­mance. They also have their own way of expres­sion. This is because they grew up in anoth­er visu­al cul­ture envi­ron­ment.

But when they tru­ly appre­ci­ate the beau­ty of these tra­di­tion­al expres­sions, you will find that they are also try­ing some kind of fusion.

For exam­ple, Tian Yu lat­er col­lab­o­rat­ed with his father on Once Upon a Time There Was a Moun­tain. You can see that the book is actu­al­ly an attempt at fusion. The back­grounds in the book were paint­ed by his father, an ink painter who par­tic­u­lar­ly likes to paint tra­di­tion­al land­scapes; the char­ac­ters were main­ly paint­ed by Tian Yu. You can see that in Tian Yu’s recent cre­ations, he has also begun to con­scious­ly explore the pro­found con­nec­tion between col­or and mean­ing. ​

​The act of “cross­ing the fault” actu­al­ly requires peo­ple to “build a bridge”.

I myself am also in the process of con­tin­u­ous learn­ing, slow­ly under­stand­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing. After under­stand­ing, some­times you can’t help but exclaim: “Wow, it turns out that you can express it this way, it’s amaz­ing.”

Some­times you just feel it but can’t say it. But as you con­tin­ue to com­mu­ni­cate and learn, you will be able to say it and express it. Oth­ers may also feel it and even begin to con­scious­ly look for such ways to express it.

You have to under­stand that visu­al lan­guage is con­stant­ly evolv­ing. We won’t always use only one way of expres­sion.

More­over, some con­tem­po­rary art expres­sions are actu­al­ly found in very ancient sources. For exam­ple, a lot of con­tem­po­rary art is actu­al­ly inspired by cave paint­ings.

There­fore, we must con­tin­ue to redis­cov­er and reopen those tra­di­tion­al ways of expres­sion.

Xiaox­i­ang:

Anoth­er top­ic sud­den­ly occurred to me.

Many of the books we just talked about, espe­cial­ly those by the old­er gen­er­a­tion of pic­ture book cre­ators, are adapt­ed from folk tales or ancient clas­sics.

As a read­er born in the 1980s, I actu­al­ly have some nat­ur­al expec­ta­tions for the fun of these adapt­ed works. I hope that they can bring a sense of “sub­ver­sion” or make me feel refreshed. If the draw­ings are just good and the text is just a sim­ple retelling of the orig­i­nal sto­ry, then I may not be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed.

So I would like to ask you:

Do you think it’s pos­si­ble for our domes­tic orig­i­nal pic­ture books to be adapt­ed into some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent in aes­thet­ics and expres­sion, like “Mulan” pub­lished by France’s Hongfei Pub­lish­ing House?

In oth­er words, will there be adapters like Mike Bar­nett and Jon Klassen in the Unit­ed States? They have adapt­ed many fairy tales, but each one has a strong per­son­al style and con­tem­po­rary inter­est. For exam­ple, the style of their adap­ta­tion of “Three Goats Gala Gala” is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent.

What do you think about this issue?

Ajia:

As you said, the French ver­sion of “Mulan” is the inter­pre­ta­tion of French cre­ators; the live-action movie ver­sion of “Mulan” and the ani­mat­ed ver­sion of “Mulan” that we see are the Amer­i­can inter­pre­ta­tions, right?

In fact, an old sto­ry may be rein­ter­pret­ed by dif­fer­ent peo­ple to cre­ate a com­plete­ly new ver­sion.

For exam­ple, the orig­i­nal sto­ry of “The Laugh­ing Old Woman Who Lost Her Rice Ball”, which won the Calde­cott Gold Medal, was col­lect­ed and com­piled by Hearn Yaku­mo, a Greek-Japan­ese who lat­er became a nat­u­ral­ized Japan­ese. The pic­ture book ver­sion of the sto­ry was adapt­ed by an Amer­i­can librar­i­an.

Such spread and adap­ta­tion is actu­al­ly a very nat­ur­al thing.

There are also dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Hua Mulan in Chi­na, such as I Am Hua Mulan, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Qin Wen­jun and Yu Rong, which is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sto­ry.

These are all good, so I don’t think there is any need to wor­ry too much.

But what I want to empha­size is that when we retell a folk sto­ry, we must have our own ideas. We must think about what we want to say to the chil­dren of today and the chil­dren of the future. This is very impor­tant, right?

For exam­ple, the song “Once Upon a Time There Was a Moun­tain” by Tian Yu that I men­tioned ear­li­er is actu­al­ly dif­fer­ent from the nurs­ery rhyme we sang when we were young, “There is a tem­ple in the moun­tain, there is an old monk in the tem­ple…” It tells more of a sto­ry about fam­i­ly affec­tion. ​

For exam­ple, didn’t I recent­ly pub­lish the sto­ry of “The Trou­ble­mak­er A‑Pu”? I actu­al­ly bor­rowed a lot of tra­di­tion­al sto­ries, not only from Chi­na but also from abroad. What I want to do is to use these tra­di­tion­al sto­ries to say some­thing new that belongs to our era.

One of the core points I want to express is: there is noth­ing new under the sun. Even if you tell a sto­ry that “seems” has nev­er been told before, you can even­tu­al­ly find its pro­to­type — it’s just told in a dif­fer­ent way.

Human emo­tions and com­plex inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships have long been thor­ough­ly explained by our ances­tors. But today, we use an old shell to tell a new sto­ry. The key lies in what your new sto­ry is about.

For exam­ple, the book “The Mon­key Catch­ing the Moon” intro­duced in my book won the first prize of the Xinyi Pic­ture Book Award that year. ​

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If you read it, you will find that although it looks like a tra­di­tion­al sto­ry, the sto­ry is actu­al­ly com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. It is said that the orig­i­nal ver­sion of “The Mon­key Catch­ing the Moon” may be a Bud­dhist sto­ry from India.

But the pic­ture book ver­sion was rewrit­ten by a “female macho” born in the 1990s. It looks like a tra­di­tion­al sto­ry, but it is actu­al­ly a rewrite of her own child­hood mem­o­ries. This is a great cre­ation! She put her child­hood mem­o­ries, her hopes for child­hood, and her under­stand­ing of growth into it.

I think this is the kind of sto­ry we par­tic­u­lar­ly need — using tra­di­tion­al sto­ries to express mean­ings that today’s chil­dren can under­stand and feel.

For exam­ple, I also rec­om­mend “The Mouse Mar­ries a Bride” in my book. There are many ver­sions of this sto­ry, but I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the one orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Tai­wan. ​

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In my opin­ion, it is actu­al­ly telling today’s chil­dren: Be brave and proac­tive in rela­tion­ships between the sex­es, don’t always wait for oth­ers to arrange things for you, and don’t think that hap­pi­ness will fall from the sky.

Hap­pi­ness is some­thing you have to fight for.

Do you think there is such an expres­sion in the tra­di­tion­al ver­sion of “The Mouse Mar­ries the Bride”? Not at all.

This “con­tem­po­rane­ity” is added by the cre­ator, but you will not feel it is out of place when read­ing it — it reads nat­u­ral­ly and is par­tic­u­lar­ly pleas­ing to the eye.

So I think retelling the clas­sics is inevitable.

All the sto­ries we tell are, in a sense, retellings of clas­sics.

It’s just that many of us haven’t read so many sto­ries, so we always feel that this sto­ry is new and that sto­ry is new to us.

But in my opin­ion, all sto­ries are actu­al­ly old sto­ries.

(The above is the third part, to be con­tin­ued)