Wave

​Suzy Lee is a Korean artist known for her remarkable silent books.  The border triology -the silent books Mirror (2003), Wave (2008) and Shadow (2010) - was her global breakthrough. The triology got it's name from the creative use of the books' centerfold. Suzy Lee has won a lot of prestigious awards, amongst them the H.C. Andersen award  in 2022. 

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The beauty of Wave is in it's simplicity. We meet a girl, a woman (her mother?), a flock of five seagulls, the beach and the wave. The little girls runs to the sea, plays with the waves, finds treasures from the ocean, goes home. While "Wave" might seem uncomplicated at first glance, its simplicity give room for so much exploring, pondering and imagination.

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When Wave was published, Lee recieved a lot of questions about the use of the centerfold. Both reviewers and bookstores thought there might be a printing mistake in the picture below, where the girls hand "disappears" into the gutter of the book. It´s not. In her text explaining the work of the Border-books, Lee tells how she uses the gutter to create a narrative crossing, a symbol of the boundaries between reality and fantasy: The left side of the book can be read as the reality, the predictable world. The right side can be read as adventure, imagination, suprises. The girl first reaches carefully into the world of imagination, but on the next page she crosses the border. We see her playing in the water, showing pure joy and happiness. Then, something happens, the wave becomes threathening. The girl escapes to the other side, feeling safe, but... surprise! In a glorius spread of a giant wave border is broken. After that, there is no longer a white/grey page and a colored page. The sky is blue, so is the girls dress. Something is different. Maybe it's impossible to cross the borders of reality and come back unaffected?

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Lee´s illustrations are brilliant. The girl, seagulls and her mother are portrayed in rough charcoal drawings, the wave in soft blue watercolor, and the two techniques create a stunning contrast to each other. She uses the long, narrow format perfectly - it folds out to be the long horizon of a seemingly endless beach, a long breath of summer and freedom. 

 

The mother is only present at the beginning and the end of the story. The child is free to explore and to express herself, to experiment and to seek out danger. She can completely immerse herself in this experience because she is not being watched. The five sea gulls are like a Greek choir, both "commenting" on the action and driving it forward. The sea starts out as waves, but in the couple of spreads before the sea breakes the border, the waves seem to take on a life of their own.​