2022 HCA Award Winner Suzy Lee: The Book as a Wonderland

2022 HCA Award Winner Suzy Lee: The Book as a Wonderland Jiwone Lee (bio) The 2022 Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration has been bestowed on Suzy Lee from Korea. Lee is an exceptional picture-book maker, book artist, and illustrator of international acclaim. The names of the artists honored by this prestigious award compose a half century’s history of children’s book illustrations, each name signifying different ideals for children’s books and their illustrations. Despite her already formidable body of work, especially the hugely influential Border Trilogy (Mirror, Shadow, and Wave), published in the 2000s, Lee is still a young artist, and the award committee weighed both her lifetime achievements and her anticipated future contributions in its decision. Lee is the first Korean to win the HCA Award. The current popularity of picturebooks in Korea makes their very short history as children’s reading material in this country difficult to believe. Interestingly, the members of Lee’s generation, a core age group in the current children’s book publishing and illustration scene in Korea, were unable to relish picturebooks themselves as children. Growing up in a reading home, Lee remembers discovering Edward Gorey’s The Shrinking of Treehorn (Heide) by chance on her mother’s bookshelves, fondly reminiscing about the strange mysteriousness of this masterpiece; nevertheless, picturebooks were largely unknown at that time. Click for larger view View full resolution Lee’s experiences in art classes and her aspiration to be a painter as a young girl are beautifully described in her autobiographical My Bright Atelier (Bir Publishing, 2008) and later evoked again in her illustrations for Cao Wenxuan’s The Yulu Linen (Bear Books, 2020). After studying painting at the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University, Lee started her work as the illustrator of a children’s novel in 1999. The 1990s witnessed the birth of new publishing houses specializing in children’s books. Korea became a member of the International Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Bern Union), founded by the Bern Convention in 1996. Despite being a newly introduced medium, in just a few short years, picturebooks from [End Page 20] all over the world, as well as new Korean works, filled the shelves of book-shops and libraries. Thus, Lee’s early years as an illustrator were characterized by an insatiable public appetite for picturebooks and a dynamic development of the children’s book market. Lee eventually decided to pursue advanced studies at the UAL Camberwell College of Art in London, one of the first art institutions to offer an MA program in book art. There, for her graduation project Lee created her first fully fledged picturebook and successful international debut, Alice in Wonderland (Edizioni Corraini, 2002). Significantly, Edizioni Corraini—the main publisher of books for children by the pioneer artist Bruno Munari—took this young Korean artist under its wing. A year later, Corraini also published Mirror (2003), the first volume of Lee’s Border Trilogy. In the rapidly developing Korean children’s book industry, Lee became the first Korean picturebook artist whose international fame reintroduced her to the Korean public, with her titles originally published overseas. Viewed historically, Alice is also a rare transitional work, moving from the nationalistic, folk-art-inspired approach of early Korean picturebooks to a more individual yet universal form of self-expression. Directly linked to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, one of the most important works of children’s literature, Lee’s Alice in Wonderland reads as a statement and provides many clues to the future development of this idiosyncratic picturebook artist. As an ambitious young illustrator, Lee raised several fundamental questions through this book: What is art? Is a book a work of art? If so, how does it function? These questions served as the starting point of her subsequent works and distinguished Lee from other contemporary illustrators. Click for larger view View full resolution The Physicality of the Book Suzy Lee’s Alice in Wonderland has a very complex structure, and the narrative unfolds within three frames: a theater, a fireplace, and a book. Initially, the main protagonists—Alice and the white rabbit—are introduced as actors in...