I See So Many Butterflies, Vol 1 - Time Out Kuala Lumpur Review

Author: Chin Yew
Time Out rating: 4/5
Self-published; RM69.90

I like Chin Yew’s ‘The Boy Who Loved Clouds’ which was published two years ago. The colourful artwork there has the feel of something that could become an animated cartoon accompanied by ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’. In it a boy floats around in a surreal world meeting an angel, a devil, plus signs and more. He’s searching for his dream, his passion and love. Now Chin Yew has another comic out at 328 pages. This time about, to put it simplistically, a break-up and the supposed outcome.

To preface his book, the artist-writer uses a quotation attributed to Chuan Tzu, ‘I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.’ And with this pithy epigram, he launches the reader into a terrain where the real and the imagined coexist without clarifying which is which (reminiscent also of a short story by Honore de Balzac about a hanging). As a consequence, time becomes liquid flowing back on itself and sometimes playing the same moment again and again like a bad nightmare that won’t let go.

Yew has adopted a few different styles to draw in this new work. Like many young artists who also work for film production houses, his drawings resemble strongly the storyboards that are created to map out the shoot. But occasionally he introduces the iconic style of Lat. And when rage takes over, the face of the character distorts as in Japanese anime. Sometimes the character is discernable from frame to frame. Other times the frame looks like Rorschach inkblot. Impressionistic.

There’s a violence inherent in this work notwithstanding the occasional emergence of the pretty butterfly. But perhaps aggression is the product of living in the twenty first century. And love too has its dark side. But likely the work will resonate with angst-bent twentysomethings.

via timeoutkl.com

Posted via web from Chin Yew's Posterous