On the afternoon of April 23, the small and beautiful Yishan Children's Bookstore gradually increased. "Open Your Book - World Book Day Family Reading Four Talks" unfolds between artist Lei Lei, picture book artist Xiong Liang, director Mai Zi, and Wei Shu, content director of Yishan Children's Bookstore. This is the first conversation in the Blue Roundtable series of Yishan Children's Bookstore, which hopes that everyone can gain thinking, rationality, vitality and creativity from dialogues that do not get standard answers.
From left, there are guests: artist Lei Lei, director Mai Zi, picture book artist Xiong Liang, and Wei Shu, content director of Yishan Children's Bookstore
At the same time, in the art exhibition hall next to the round table event, Lei Lei's "Books on Books" exhibition has just opened. The exhibition hall is paved with candy-colored, irregularly shaped carpets and building blocks, and the author is standing at the entrance of the exhibition hall trying to understand all this, and a few children run behind them, who take off their shoes and jump on the carpet, and directly lift the blocks to set up. Later dialogues confirmed that these spontaneous acts of the children were in perfect harmony with lei Lei's exhibition planning, and the children's play, touch, change, and assembly continued the artist's work creation, giving it a sense of time and vitality. And the round table of family reading begins with this exhibition.
Books on Books: Books that are constantly moving and butterflying
Lei Lei is an animation director, most of his works are related to the audience in the theater, and "books on books" is a way for him to expand from animation to space. Xiong Liang described the exhibition as having a "feeling of getting lost." "Walking into the exhibition hall is like walking into an absurd world," Xiong Liang sighed, "when I was a child, I liked such colors, and when I grew up, I would be very free." These bright and simple colors and patterns that attracted him were the inspiration Lei lei got from his father, the book designer. He collaged and reconstructed the contents of one of his father's 1988 editions of his work book and binding design book, creating new images with memories of his father's generation, and then printing them on blocks and carpets.
Lei Lei's "Books on Books" exhibition
Lei Lei interacted with the children at the scene
The exhibition was first opened to adults. Until Lei Lei learned that in the A4 Art Museum in Chengdu, there is a permanent project called "I start Art Festival". The "I start festival" is aimed at living communities, where children and artists exhibit their works in parallel, as well as as curators and volunteers. "If you still think of yourself as an artist who is higher than a child, this context is difficult to enter." In the second exhibition, Lei Lei tried to add interactive content that is very important to children, but the blocks on the carpet at that time were still flat, and he assumed that the children would assemble the blocks like playing tangrams. But as soon as the children entered the house, they took the building blocks and built it three-dimensionally. At this time, Li Jie, the chief curator of the A4 Art Museum who was watching the exhibition with him, said to him: "Look, who in front of the children dares to say that they are artists. Inspired by the children, the "book on the book" is renewed again in the Yishan Bookstore, in this intimate space that Lei Lei said is not a white box. The building blocks are made into a three-dimensional, more convenient module in the hands of children to undergo new changes. "A lot of the ideas before the exhibition were unfounded, and the children would break those restrictions." Lei Lei once again felt at the scene that children are better than their own imagination, "In this exhibition, adults can also play with children." He wants more people to be as creative as children and work with them. I hope that when my children go home, they will also turn everything in their homes and bookshelves into their own works.
Children are a state
As a children's bookstore, the children's nature of reading and creation is a topic that the round table has to talk about. In Wei Shu's eyes, the guests present have a common trait, that is, they have all bid farewell to their childhood, but they still maintain a childlike nature. However, when Teacher Xiong Liang, who has created many picture books, confessed that he did not usually read a lot of children's books, the people present seemed to be a little surprised. But Xiong Liang quickly gave a good reason: there are many children's books, and children's fun is not limited to children's books. Talking about his childhood reading experience, his parents did not choose books for Xiong Liang, but gave him an attic with bookshelves. "Read any book, choose your own, like Edgar Allan Poe the most, boring books will also read, such as "Beauty and Skeletons."」 In the world of reading, which is not urged to sleep and go downstairs, Xiong Liang prefers the dark style and is fascinated by this kind of life that can only be understood through reading, which is different from reality. The reading preferences of the Enlightenment period also continued to influence Xiong Liang's later creations. Wei Shu's favorite Xiong Liang's work is "Plum Rain Monster", this picture book is relatively dark in color, so some parents are worried that their children will be afraid. "Who were the readers who created this book?" "It must be for children," Xiong Liang replied, "because children like disgusting things." When the laughter in the audience subsided, he added: "All the books are green, so I want to make a dark, ugly book." ”
wheat
Indiscriminate reading is also the experience of Wheat Girls' Generation. Mothers who work in printing factories always bring home sample books that have not passed the quality inspection, many of which are not even bound into books. "Reading is slow and hot, and it is on the basis of quantity to find quality." Mai Zi said she believes that children who read a lot will gradually develop a natural ability to distinguish books. That's how she found herself a sense of books, and although there are now popular evaluation systems like Douban scores, they're not absolute. In the process of telling the child a story, Maizi also realized that her and the child's focus on the same book may be completely different, and she was more determined to spend time and energy to find the book that would touch her. She encourages children to choose their own books. "If you don't know how to choose, look at the cover selection." Sometimes, a favorite cover can also be a failed book selection, but Maizi thinks it doesn't matter either. The success or failure experience of choosing a book is very important, the intimacy between the child and the book is forming, and the cover of a book first arouses the child's curiosity.
As Xiong Liang said, except for babies who are limited by cognitive boundaries, books do not have an absolute age threshold. Mai Zi is also very calm about some of the so-called over-age content in the book, in contrast, she wants to break the gender line in the classic fairy tale: women's perfect endings are mostly from the gifts of fate, while men have won their lives because of their respective qualities. She had read the early, uncut version of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Bluebeard, and even if the latter left some shadows, it was a way to warn and avoid lightning for her future self. Child sexuality seems to build a protective barrier between the child and the adult plot. Help them understand a whole new problem with a young eye.
It's not a pipe
Compared with everyone's reading experience, Lei Lei's is more polare: pure text or pure image. For him, while graphics and texts can interpret each other, words can also force us to understand images, interfering with and reducing the readability of images. He once flipped through a photographic collection, and for him at that time, the size was so small that it was almost negligible, but it distinguished between the pictures and texts. He doesn't remember whose collection it was or what was taken, his memory is the graininess of the photograph. This memory could even remind him of his life in Xi'an when he flipped through the book.
The specific impression brought by the picture responds to Xiong Liang's creative view of directly conveying the experience before the language occurs. To present the first impression and subtle connection of things is to create.
"It's not a pipe." Lei Lei laughed and said that it was Maizi's words that inspired him to think about the complex relationship between graphics and language. Before seeing the world with her own eyes, wheat imagined them through words, and she remembered the first time she read about the sea from a book, the sea was dark blue, and she thought of the dark blue tablecloth at home, blown up by the wind, rippled. She also told a fable by director Imatoshi: Imatoshi saw a child reading manga at the airport, which deeply touched the animation director, but he still wanted to come forward and persuade him to read more text books. Combined with her own reading habits, MaiZi believes that reducing children's appeal to images can delay their formation of an inherent perception of the world as much as possible.
As long as it is a paper book, children are encouraged to read it. This is Wheat's belief in children's reading. She places the accumulated, large number of books in various places in the home so that children can see the books from anywhere they stand and pick up a book as soon as they feel idle. For adults, reading is also the only way to learn. "The child was reading Cai Lan's book on ingredients two days ago." MaiZi said, "Although I don't think the content of this book is helpful to him now, he read it with relish." "It's important to maintain the ability to read.
You don't have to dream of becoming an artist
The discussion continued to draw conclusions that were unexpected, which seemed to be the biggest feature of the whole round table, and it was also the interesting and cute point of this dialogue.
There is no logic that becomes an artist because of the seed of the artist. When Lei Lei was a child, the only attempt to design books was to draw comics and bind them into paper drawings. Thankfully, his parents respected their hobbies, and the big tiger he painted was always pasted on their wardrobes. And once faced with art education, in his personal experience, independent, wild dreams are difficult to survive, and they will not grow again until after college. Now Lei Lei, as a father, will also face distress and failure for the problem of his children's education. "It's not necessarily that artists have a better way to teach their children, but artists are also groping." During a visit to a private kindergarten, Lei Lei played a simple game with the children, the children could hit his hands, and he would make different sounds. The children had a great time and played harder and harder. "Maybe it's just spending more time with children. What matters is real life, fun life, and not necessarily the dream of becoming an artist. ”
Bear Liang
Xiong Liang once again used the reversed ending and agreed with Lei Lei's point of view. Of course, the books he read have influenced his current creation, he recalled, when he was a child, he always wanted to have a studio, to be a painter, and then read the story of the monk in Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, the monk only loved one thing all his life, and in the end this thing did not succeed, he lost everything. It's scary. Xiong Liang realized that he needed many hobbies besides painting. He is a painter who has practiced boxing, is writing, and has recently become passionate about reading original English poems, studying the inner structure of poetry against translations. If attachment reaches the end, if it has become interested, or has become self-deception, this attachment is unnecessary.
"Once the dream is embodied, it becomes narrow and single, but the realization of the single needs to be timely and geographical. If left unrestricted, the future will be more flexible. "Maizi's dream is to be related to art and be a good person. She switches between the diverse identities of dancers, directors, and actors, and enjoys a free space. When they talk to children about their dreams, they are more talking about future life patterns. "The future that children say is improvised."
If childhood is not only a natural attribute of children that disappears with growth, but more like the poetry that they burst out of in order to grow up and directly grab more limited experience, then the bold and free childlike nature of every adult who comes into contact with new knowledge may also be reborn. Be friends with children on adventures and let books be our guides.