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Illustration

Han Wen

A young cartoonist living in a small apartment by the railroad tracks. 

A worker producing candles in a strange square building.

A stray cat getting tired of it all decides to escape the metropolis. 

An alien living on earth in tranquility for twenty-three years.

Degree Details

School of Communication

Illustration
Han Wen

The imaginary or the 'existence of unreality' is essential in my practice. The act of imagination is one of the bases of human life, a particular form of ‘human response’ to the objective world. As a visual artist who works between narrative image-making and text, I explore the expressive potential of visual storytelling, reproducing subtle moments and complicated emotions in the form of poetic fiction. I examine and exploit the capacity of the surreal imagination to respond to and cast new light on objective reality, find wonder in the banal and create meaning and connection in response to internal and external landscapes of alienation. 

My recent project plays with the power of multi-layered narrative construction. To intensify the notion of time on the page, I experiment with deconstructing the formal components of the graphic novel.

[untitled]
— Trailer (CLOCK VER.)
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today — Trailer
Intro
Intro — A young cartoonist living in a small apartment by the railroad tracks.
Chapter I
Chapter I — The Liar
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today — Trailer
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today — Trailer
Extract from the narrative script of A Stray Cat’s Soliloquy
Extract from the narrative script of A Stray Cat’s Soliloquy
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today
I Think It’s Going to Rain Today — Trailer

I Think It’s Going to Rain Today examines the sense of loss and alienation that modern urbanites experience in a hyper-capitalist society. It is a montage of poetic stories exploring and embodying the psychological concerns, complicated emotions, and endless confusions of individuals. The work experiments with multiple narrative structures, generating surreal visual analogies to delineate the relationship between the external world and the spiritual world of the mind. The narrative is constructed of five seemingly independent parts gradually merging with the passage of time in the story.

For RCA2021 I present the project as a ‘movie trailer’ in the form of a printed graphic novel. The height of the gutter between panels corresponds with the time span between the happenings inside the panels and the author's perception of time within the story. When the gutter is used for indicating the span of time, the surrounding blank space on the page becomes time itself. The graphic novel becomes a timeline and each panel becomes an independent event, a moment embedded in the blankness of time.

Medium:

Digital Printing