Xiong Liang
Chinese picture book author, pioneer of Chinese picture book world. He is the first Chinese illustrator who won the top 5 shortlist in the Hans Christian Andersen Award, an award for outstanding illustrators.
In 2019, Macao Public Library invited famous picture book author Xiong Liang from Mainland China to be the keynote speaker in the lectures of Actividade de promoção da leitura “Livros ao Sol" 2019 (Reading promotion activity "Books of the Sun" 2019). Xiong’s works adopt simple lines and the technique of ink painting to depict Chinese traditional culture and oriental philosophy, breaking through the limit of language expression and showing a unique sense of humour and poetry, which can be easily understood by readers of different cultural background and age groups.
At the beginning, Xiong Liang mainly focused on creating picture books for adults with a pen name “Xiong An”. His works back then was relatively grey just as his pen name implied, as “An” means dark in Chinese; but ever since he had himself a daughter, he started to create picture books for children with bright colours. His children picture books such as The Little Stone Lion, The Monster of Mould Rains and A Battle at Changbanpo and so on are very popular among readers. The style of his works seems to be a little weird, yet without losing the traditional Chinese techniques and elements, thus carries very strong personal characteristics. "In fact, I didn't deliberately try to adopt tradition. I learned traditional Chinese paintings since I was a child. I also enjoy reading Chinese classic literary works. These are things that I am familiar with and they naturally become the inspiration for my creation,” Xiong said. “At the same time, it is structured work to create stories for picture books. That is to say, behind stories there are historical and social elements of the local region. Therefore, young creators should start from the environment they are familiar with and know more about the history and culture of the place. It is recommended to use local cultural materials during our creation, searching for familiarity from the stories and find a sense of freshness from the painting, so that different readers could resonate with the work.”
Xiong said he is a very “wild” creator. He would not push the central idea in his work like a textbook. Rather, he prefers to let the readers discover it by themselves. "Most of the picture books in China tend to express ideas in a teaching manner. To put it simple, it is like an adult who delivers words and conveys the truth they want to tell children through stories. But this is not what I want to do. I prefer to start from the perspective of children in my creation.” He further explains, “Children are different from adults. Children observe and understand the world through language, colour and graphics. In The Little Stone Lion, I used different sizes of stone lions to express, showing stone lions both far and close. In this way, the children find it interesting, and it can motivate them to continue reading, discover and feel the emotions within the pictures.”
The Little Stone Lion is one of Xiong Liang’s famous works.
