"A mosquito barges into your sweet dreams, a gecko hides itself at home, a whale sweeps the town, a wild boar intrudes a kid's wear shop in a mall, a bat feasts on apples in a supermarket…to these underwhelming animals, does such a daunting city get on their nerves too? Do they, every once in a while, join the insomniacs club and venture into an eerie dream?" Dreams of A Toad takes you on a trip to the seemingly mundane yet neurotically fantastic world of animal fables.
Born in 1984, Wah Yan grew up next to Lai Yuen and studied fine arts at New Asia College of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Wah Yan is an artist and a printmaker whose drawings and illustrations have been published in numerous local magazines and newspapers including Ming Pao, C for Culture, Muse, META, Ming Pao Weekly and City Magazine. She has also worked on book publications and designed posters for various theatre projects. Some of her occasional group exhibitions include “Zoo As Metaphor” (2014) and “Zoo As Metaphor 2” (2018). In 2009, she organised "P-at-riot June-forth Cultural Festival" with her friends. She was also a member of Wooferten from 2011 to 2013. Her debut solo exhibition "Fragments" was held in 2013. In 2014, she started her bi-weekly comic strip Me1 World in Sunday Mingpao. She has devoted much of her creative efforts to printmaking in recent years. She was an artist-in-residence at Proyecto’ace, Argentina in 2017 and started Printhow, a printmaking collective, with her friends the same year.
Once upon a time, there was a mosquito who yearned to become a social animal. Every day she pondered how to become popular and endearing, to give a good impression. “Be kind before expecting kindness,” she recalled the teaching from her mother. Be not afraid to talk to strangers was the first step. The mosquito convinced her mother to let her go out alone, to make new friends.
On her way, the mosquito met a butterfly dancing in the crowd. She went up to her and asked, “What does it take to be like you, an endearing butterfly?” The butterfly cast the mosquito a glance and answered, “Born this way.” The mosquito did not know how to respond and continued her journey. She met a dragonfly, who looked more approachable than the butterfly, so she asked, “What does it take to be like you, an endearing dragonfly?” “Be gracious and upfront.” Just when the mosquito was about to ask further, the dragonfly has already headed off. Making new friends was not as easy as thought, the mosquito reflected. A cicada resting on the tree said heedlessly, “Why bother? What’s the point to be endearing?”
The mosquito did not want to bother anyone. She knew too well that she was not as good looking as the butterfly, not as gracious as the dragonfly, not as unworldly as the cicada. Somewhat lost yet incredibly brave, the mosquito decided to fly off to somewhere even further away for an answer. Over the barren hills, spectacular skyscrapers, big houses and small huts, the mosquito has visited one bedroom of stranger after another.
On a sultry night, the mosquito came to a bed of a family of three. The kid has just fallen sound asleep. She tried her best to fly as gracefully as the butterfly but fell a bit short, so she tried to be as affectionate as possible and went up to give the kid a kiss. She tried to be as upfront as the dragonfly and whispered into the kid’s ear, “Do you like me? I want to be your friend~” Stirred by the buzzing beating of her wings, the annoyed kid struck a few slaps to get rid of her.
Simply because I like Wah Yan’s prints much. They impress me for their explicit weirdness and implicit cruelty. They touch me for their humanity. They move me for the experimentalism in their making. All these qualities contribute to a final uniqueness that belongs only to Wah Yan’s way of creation and no others’. As a person, Wah Yan never intends to be loud; but as an artist, she lets her prints stand out by themselves. The depiction of wild beings trapped in bizarre situations attracts us to scrutinise the details and the nuances to make up our own stories. She is subdued but her images shine and sublimate in a metaphorical way enclaved in starkness and perhaps darkness.
As for her words, as much as Wah Yan loves reading and writing, writings have never been her major creative efforts. In this book, Wah Yan wants her words to appear just as vivid as her prints, both independent of each other but also inter-dependent with each other. Their closeness is both complementary and creating tension. Whilst her words are made up of varied syntax and styles, be they poetry, prose or story, the consistently strong and complicated contours and varied shades of black of her prints do take away readers’ first glance before they allow themselves to immerse in her writings. The narrative in her words more often than not takes detour from people’s normal way of reading. One cannot really find a consistent structure or form there, but can awkwardly identify a certain quality that echoes her print works: words that run in a weird and experimental manner. And, one can easily read it in a metaphorical sense.
Having wandered in her dreams for a thousand nights, Wah Yan is now showing us her strenuous way in searching for her words and her assured way in conjuring her images. Let us now read the book in a different light, with a different mind and a different heart. Not all the metaphors of her images and words can be readily captured by us; they can perhaps lead us to create our own mindscape resonating with our very own sensibility towards the human conditions around us as hinted or not hinted by Wah Yan. It may well be the true intention of publishing this book after all.
黑色早晨 A Murky Morning 蟾蜍夢多 Dreams of A Toad 蚊子多情 A Tender Mosquito 跑上街 A Bolting Boar 蝙蝠惡果 The Bat’s Apple 打蛇餅 A Coiled Snake 颱風來了 Here Comes Typhoon 蝸牛郵件 The Snail Mail 夜蛾驗眼 Night Moth’s Eye Test 逃脫的尾巴 A Fled Tail 阿根廷牛肉 Argentine Beef 夢的背叛 The Betrayal of Dreams
後記 Afterwords 華欣 壓印的夢境 Wah Yan A Dreamscape of Press and Print Daniela Ruiz Moreno I dream another dream, in a dream of another… 我夢到另一個夢,捲進另一個夢…… May Fung The Publisher’s Words 馮美華 出版人的話
動物索引 Animal Index 版畫索引 Plates Index
目錄 Contents
黑色早晨 A Murky Morning 蟾蜍夢多 Dreams of A Toad 蚊子多情 A Tender Mosquito 跑上街 A Bolting Boar 蝙蝠惡果 The Bat’s Apple 打蛇餅 A Coiled Snake 颱風來了 Here Comes Typhoon 蝸牛郵件 The Snail Mail 夜蛾驗眼 Night Moth’s Eye Test 逃脫的尾巴 A Fled Tail 阿根廷牛肉 Argentine Bee...