Tales from a diverse universe by Shaun Tan – gallery

Shaun Tan’s ground breaking graphic novel The Arrival tells the story an immigrant’s experience with no words. In this gallery Shaun explains why themes of diversity infuse everything he writes and paints and why he’s “still the child on the loungeroom floor with a pencil, just trying to figure it all out”

Shaun Tan

  • The Arrival’s purely visual narrative requires no translation. It’s a simple tale known to so many families throughout history, of a man in search of a better life for his family in an unknown country. I imagined a country that is foreign in the truest possible sense, one that can only exist on paper
    Arrival suitcase

  • The Arrival: the old country.A brief vision of the country being left behind, for reasons as mysterious as they are obvious. It’s interesting that readers never ask me what such landscapes mean, in spite of the absurdist elements. I think we all understand on some deep level that the fate of human society is often confounding and irrational
    ARrival the old country

  • The Arrival: the journey.Space and time often collapse together in a picture, and what I love about drawing is a certain ambiguity of scale, a possible timelessness in the static fusion of tiny pencil strokes. This is very handy when trying to communicate something like an epic ocean voyage over very few pages
    Arrival the journey

  • The Arrival: the new country. A scene inspired by images of immigrants arriving in New York, particularly in an age when people had no idea what that were coming to: a place even less familiar than the moon
    Arrival the new country

  • The Arrival: street life. I rarely consider my imagery surrealist in the true sense, that is, preoccupied with an irrational subconscious. I’m more interested in a simple meditation on the fact that all reality, from the past to the present, is fundamentally strange: a melting pot of nature and culture that is anything but “normal”.
    Arrival: Street life

  • The Arrival: the housemate. A small creature that ends up playing an important role in the story, although I’m still not entirely sure what it means! Something to do with acceptance, since the immigrant must share a small apartment with this animal, one of many inexplicable new-world customs.
    Arrival encounter

  • The Arrival: the dinner guest.Our protagonist is dependent, as so many travellers are, on the kindness of locals. Here a new-world family invite him to a family dinner, the like of which he has never seen. Throughout this book I drew on many of my own experiences of travelling in Europe and Asia
    Arrival the dinner guest

  • The Arrival: night of the giants. Every resident of the new world has their own tale to tell and reasons to give up a life they know for one they don’t. This is one of the more dramatic tales, inspired by accounts of totalitarian persecution: a society in which complex diversity is obliterated in favour of a single “truth”
    Arrival giants smaller

  • The Arrival: the many. All of the details in The Arrival were based on research particularly oral histories recorded by people migrating from Europe and Asia to Australia and North America. I receive a great deal of feedback from migrants who strongly identify with details in The Arrival as if it is a dreamlike parallel to of their own journey
    Arrival many

  • This is a painting produced for a public library in Perth, Western Australia. The image is based on a tiny photograph found in a local museum, and a family photograph from about 1910-20, at a time when the suburb was largely undeveloped bush. I was interested in how a transplanted British culture was rendered suddenly exotic.
    100 year picnic

  • The Rabbits is a tale of colonization based on a text by author John Marsden. This was a quite controversial book when first published in Australia, in part because there remains a tendency think that all picture books are for very young children (and this isn’t). But also the fact that many Australians struggle to accept certain facts of history
    rabbits Shaun Tan

  • A concept sketch for some of the many creatures appearing briefly in the animated film adaptation of The Lost Thing (a British-Australian co-production). I’ve always loved these characters in particular – Iron Lung, Incubator and their children – as a suggestion that harmony has little to do with uniformity
    Proud parents

  • Tales from Outer Suburbia: No Other Country. A short story about a Mediterranean migrant family who move to a bleak outer suburb of Australia, but find relief in the discovery that a hole in their roof-space leads to an otherworldly “old country”
    No Other country

  • Tales from Outer Suburbia: Broken Toys. A tale about a lost Japanese diver, inspired by many tragic tales of migrant pearl divers in Australia’s northwest who died from the bends. I believe storytelling is essentially about giving a voice to voiceless members of society and history
    Broken Toys

  • Tales from Outer Suburbia: The Amnesia Machine. Probably the darkest tale in this collection, and unfortunately the most relevant when considering the current Australian leadership. Here a strange machine is wheeled through residential suburbs, following an ice-cream van, just before every election. Nobody can quite remember what it does
    Amnesia Machine

  • The title for my story Alert But Not Alarmed came from a government leaflet campaign about the dangers of terrorism, which might as well have said “Alarmed but not alert” were it to describe how many governments would prefer their voting public to be
    Suburbia missiles

  • Heads series: Dogma and Tree. Two of a series of unpublished personal drawings, currently part of an exhibition at the Illustrationcupboard Gallery in London. These are open to interpretation, but might be understood as representations of feeling and belief, variously open or resistant
    heads

  • Our Tuesday Afternoon Reading Group. Who would not want to be a member of this club? Originally an editorial illustration for a reading guide supplement, this painting has much to say about the way books can bring different people together without insisting on any kind of uniformity
    Reading group
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