儿童插画家促进中国文化

Yu Hongcheng is a young illustrator born in 1989. She began considering a design for her illustrated book at the end of 2013 following a trip to Dali, southwest China's Yunnan province.

As she encountered local farmers who were working hard in crops, she made up her mind to draw a book for them as the illustrator herself explains:

"I hope to use my own style to record traditional means of farming in China. Through my illustrations, readers can see their farming techniques and devices are extremely old fashioned in contrast to the advanced electronic tools, which are applied in the modern Chinese agricultural system. A huge water-driven rice pounder remains in use there and maybe after several years, it might fade out of history. So I decided to record it via my illustrations which I think is really a good and interesting way to keep a record of Chinese agriculture. In my opinion it is a lot better than the plain written documents."

Yu's book "Where Does Rice Come From?" has won her the Bologna Children's Book Fair Award for illustration.

Now this book's copyright becomes available in Cambodia, giving young local readers a chance to understand the agricultural traditions of their neighboring country.

Zhan Hengfeng is the deputy general manager of China Children's Press and Publication Group, which published Yu Hongcheng's book and exported its copyright.

"There is still a big challenge for us to sell Chinese children's books overseas. Actually we try to promote our books worldwide, and Cambodia is the first country that imported Yu's book simply because what her book depicts is a landscape similar to Cambodia's natural environment. Today, we advocate telling Chinese stories by our own artistic means, but we also have to ensure young foreign readers could understand those stories by reading illustrations."

"Hoeing the grass under the noonday sun,
His sweat drips on the ground beneath.
Who knows that on the dining plate,
Every single grain means hardship."

This is an ancient Chinese poem, Sympathy for Peasants, written by Li Shen, a poet in Tang dynasty over 1,000 years ago. This poem was illustrated to demonstrate to young readers both at home and abroad the importance of not wasting even a single grain of rice, and how this is considered a betrayal of the hard work and sweat that the peasants have put into growing it.

Illustrated books help young minds grasp these excellent lessons despite the language barrier some of the young readers may have. Zhao Hengfeng thinks this is where the charm of a book filled with illustrations derives from.

"This book also imparts knowledge, telling children in details how our food in the plate is made. Her illustrations represent a traditional Chinese style of painting, but they are drawn in a manner that is easy to understand. This helps foreign readers interpret the meaning of the book. In my opinion, a criterion to evaluate if it's a truly good picture-book is that readers may understand 60 to 70% of the contents by merely looking at those illustrations."

Earlier at the Bologna Children's Book Fair in Italy, Martin Salisbury, a professor at Cambridge School of Art, and also an illustrator and author, noted that Chinese picture books have its pictures well integrated together to tell the story.

The professor also added the development of Chinese illustrators and their works will open up new collaboration opportunities on the education side for China and other nations to learn from one another.

For Studio Plus, I'm Wang Lei.