Drawn along cultural lines
From his observations of life in the Yangtze River Delta region, illustrations of classic poems to his famous interpretation of the Monkey King, Zhang Guangyu's artworks are finally collected in a new series of books, Fang Aiqing reports.
Covarrubias once completed over 30 illustrations for classic Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh－one that enjoys equal popularity with Journey to the West, and he had met Zhang in Shanghai in the 1930s.
Zhang, too, had created a group of figures for Outlaws of the Marsh in Hong Kong during the World War II. This work forms the third book of comics in the new collection.
Additionally, his drawings included figures of the classic novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), household folklore, legends of ethnic people, Indonesian dancers, and an exclusive series of women.
It's fine to decorate and exaggerate a bit in comics as long as its meaning and sarcasm are not diminished, Zhang wrote in his preface of the first edition of Xiyou Manji in 1958.
