The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
by Sonny Liew
Buy on AmazonNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From a bestselling graphic novelist comes “a hugely ambitious, stylistically acrobatic work” (The New York Times Book Review) that brings us on a uniquely moving, funny, and thought-provoking journey through the life of an artist and the history of a nation. Meet Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Now in his early 70s, Chan has been making comics in his native Singapore since 1954, when he was a boy of 16. As he looks back on his career over five decades, we see his stories unfold before us in a dazzling array of art styles and forms, their development mirroring the evolution in the political and social landscape of his homeland and of the comic book medium itself.…
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"The pressure-cooker country of Singapore – tiny and polyglot, globally competitive and politically repressive – seems to have been poured out into this dense book. Liew’s dazzling versatility enables him to create a lifetime’s worth of work for an artist who never really existed, ranging from shabbily printed comics pages to elegant pencil sketches. Meanwhile, he acerbically recounts Singaporean history stretching back to World War II. By documenting the career of this imaginary creator, Liew mourns all those who were never permitted to thrive under Singapore’s oppressive government."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org