Shaun Tan finds the strange in familiar places
The Australian illustrator says a good painting should move its audience, while practice and sustained interest matter more than the idea of innate talent.
For Shaun Tan, a painting succeeds when it lands emotionally — even with a five-year-old. The Australian illustrator told The Guardian that he sometimes asks his children to look at work in progress, watching for a response that is “a bit happy and a bit creepy”.
Tan’s approach to skill is similarly grounded. Looking back on his early work, he says he was not supremely talented; he had an interest that deepened with time. “I think interest is talent because it keeps you doing the thing,” he said, describing practice as the route to getting better.
That view grew from a childhood spent drawing. Born in Perth to a Chinese Malaysian father and an Australian mother, Tan attended a specialist art high school in Balcatta, where he says he learned most of the basic artistic skills he still uses. He later won a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for The Arrival, and an Oscar for the film adaptation of The Lost Thing.
His newest work, Hometown, follows a teenage girl whose ordinary town is unsettled by the arrival of a stranger from another world. Tan values endings that remain unresolved: a story that explains everything, he says, can leave no “residual echo” in the reader’s mind.
That openness runs through the way he looks at everyday surroundings. Tan described familiar places as hard to see afresh, and imagined trees as lungs and paths as organs. Even the unplanned backs of buildings, he said, can have their own composition.
His illustrations offer another “thin skin of reality”, as Tan puts it: a way to question the familiar and glimpse other possibilities. The work’s uncertainty is part of its invitation, leaving viewers with room to keep looking.
