Plastic Green Bear

 

Happy Chinese New Year, this year it is the year of the rabbit, the illustration is by Plastic Green Bear. 

Eunsil Chun III

Eunsil Chun's 'Wind in the Willows' has a fantastic composition of landscape and scale. Eunsil Chun's work has an otherworldly, miniature feel that makes it magical, you look cross her images and are transported into a secret world in the undergrowth.

Jo Inhyuk

Jo Inhyuk paints disarmingly poignant, personal, incisive, translucent portraits of young women that are disarming in their honest and sometimes startling portrayal. Jo is also an incredibly talented graphic designer.

Yeji Yun IV

My second feature of Yeji Yun in a week, I do love this artist's use of colour and strange zine like books on surreal subjects. This one is called 'On the rocks' 

Yeji Yun III

Yeji Yun has made a lovely cat zine based on the exploits of her cat Mamoo

Bonbonohri II

I adore these beautifully simple food illustrations by Bonbonohri below are two examples of her project on bread and above coffee and toast from 'Daily'. 

Sophia Han

This is an illustrator found on the Illustrators wall at Bologna, her name is Sophia Han who is based in Anyang, Korea. Her work is very varied and has been used extensively commercially. These images are from her children's book, 'Into the Forest'. I like the variety of line and texture but also the contrary layout of the bottom image. 

Jihyun Woo and Jungduk Lee

'A Walk' written and illustrated by Jihyun Woo and embroidered by Jungduk Lee. This Korean book has delicate naive illustrations beautifully rendered in embroidery.

Cho Eun Young II

This week I am trying to catch up with treasures that I have saved. I found this book 'First Breast Feeding' at the Bologna Children's Book Festival in the spring.  It is a Korean book, illustrated by Cho Eun Young, about breast feeding created using expressive, monochrome line drawing. Due to the subject matter, it is so unlikely that this book would ever have been published in this country and I think it is amazing, wonderfully expressive and beautiful work.
All through this year books have come up in discussions and lectures that would not be published  in this country. This censorship by market-driven publishing then  extends to illustrators and authors who self-censor and avoid subjects, stories and work that they consider will be unpublishable. I find this very sad and worry about the limitations that this places on creativity, knowledge and culture.

Seungyoun Kim

Today I am featuring Seungyoun Kim's book 'Foxhat' which is a story about a girl who can't communicate with the world and all she wants is to keep a baby fox, so she disguises a baby fox on her head pretending to her mother it is a fox fur hat. This is a lovely book with small drawings beautifully punctuating the space of the page.

Na-Rae, Lee

Can my favourite book of the Bologna book fair be a book about  . . . 'Burnt Toast', yes it can! In this story the toaster seems to create toast that matches the creature about to eat it. The book is stunning and comes in it's own toasting bag. Burnt toast is by the Korean illustrator Lee Na-Rae.