Seven Norwegian Artists Came to Beijing for the First Time. Their Picture Books Run on a Very Different Imagination

They also explained how their country supports picture-book making, a business that barely earns anything.

On the evening of August 23, in a café on Meishuguan Houjie in Beijing's Dongcheng District, the Norwegian artist Fredrik Rysjedal held a microphone and played two of his "electronic comic" shorts for the few dozen Chinese viewers in the room: Close, Closer, Closest and Sound of the Aurora. Electronic comics are a kind of motion comic — within the traditional comics industry, a marginal form that grew out of smartphones and tablets.

Fredrik never knew his grandfather, who died 15 years before he was born. All he knew was that the man had been a sailor during World War II. If he hadn't gone looking, his grandfather's story might have ended inside his parents' memories.

In the video, Fredrik's parents sit in their living room and, set off by a radio news item, start talking about the Germans. Through their recollections, his grandfather's strange experience turns into animated lines — a warship at sea, the grandfather seeing a woman standing in the waves, and then finding that every sailor on board had seen her too...

Fredrik said, with some regret, that he had no way to pair this screening with live music. In 2016, when he premiered Sound of the Aurora at Mariakirken in his hometown of Bergen, Norway, he brought in the well-known Norwegian experimental band 1982, so that the comic screening doubled as a small experimental rock concert.

The performance opened an exhibition called "One Person's Picture-Book Show — A Sino-Norwegian Bookshelf Adventure." It ran for three days, and seven artists from Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, brought their work to Beijing for it. In early August, several of them had already taken part in the second abc Art Book Fair, at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai.

Fredrik was one of the organizers of the visiting group. Since 2013 he has been the founder and chief organizer of the annual Bergen Art Book Fair, where artists from across Norway bring art books, zines, picture books, posters and more. The fair's growth has also helped make Bergen the center of Norway's independent comics culture.

For most of them, this was a first trip to Beijing. The people who arranged it were a Chinese couple living in Bergen: Yu Wenhou, an architect and literary translator, and Yi Lei, a visual designer. Over the past two years, in their spare time, they started a nonprofit called Northing, which carries contemporary culture in both directions between Norway and China.

"Our idea is pretty simple," Yu Wenhou and Yi Lei told QDaily. "The Bergen Art Book Fair gave us the idea. Art books may be a very new form for readers in China, and we wanted to bring that form here."

Abroad, art books stand apart from books put out by mainstream publishers: independent, self-published work, free in both content and form. That includes the zine — an independent magazine, popular in Europe and the US, a word Yu Wenhou renders into Chinese with a near-homophone meaning roughly "bewitching journal."

Fredrik runs Bergen Zines, an imprint he started six years ago. Besides publishing zines by himself and his collaborators, he often holds "zine nights" in bookstores and cafés.

The three days weren't only talks and displays by the Norwegian authors. Part of the time went to work by several dozen Chinese picture-book artists, much of it drawings that had yet to find a publisher.

That was a deliberate choice by Mao Yimin, founder of the Shicha Picture Book Studio, the exhibition's Chinese organizer.

Mao Yimin, born in the 1970s, was once a reporter at New Weekly. In 2011, with a Briton named Dorian, she started an e-zine called Meridian (《时差》), meant at first to gather creators across 24 time zones. She later changed course and spent three years assembling a "Shicha Picture Book United Nations" fairy-tale series, picking one nationally treasured tale from each of ten countries on four continents.

Mao Yimin told QDaily: "In the early 2000s I started doing independent cultural publishing projects. Back then the cultural climate felt better than it does now — Beijing felt full of life. Lots of people came here to do all kinds of art projects. Caochangdi, for instance, had plenty of them — people from Taiwan, from Hong Kong, foreigners too, people from all sorts of cultural backgrounds came here. The hutongs held a lot of that mixing as well."

Now Mao Yimin works mainly on picture books: "In China, picture books get shown in a very narrow way — most of them are just children's picture books. The world of them is actually enormous, and that settled our decision to keep going in this direction."

In scale, though, the Shicha picture-book show was more like a garden party among peers. Tickets went on sale to the general public for the 24th and 25th. Mao Yimin said she would have been happy to sell 1,000; in the end she sold 500.

Kay Arne Kirkebø, one of the visiting artists, said: "Plenty of people in Norway complain, but we really are a fairly lucky country. For the past two years I've hardly needed other work to pay for my art."

This year Kay published his first art book, Walkthrough. He told QDaily that no publishing house was involved: he published it himself, with a culture grant from the Bergen city government and money from the Norwegian Visual Artists Association.

On the Bergen city government's website, it takes no effort to find, under the "Culture, Sport and Community" section, the channel for applying for the annual arts and culture grants. They cover amateur groups — choirs, community cultural organizations — as well as professional artists and cultural workers. Artists can also apply for dedicated housing.

The money that brought these seven Norwegians to China came from exactly this kind of government grant. As Yu Wenhou put it: "We're Chinese, and we still got funded."

Kay's obsessions are the city, and the video games, science fiction and rock music he grew up with. Walkthrough follows a person heading home from work by an absurdly convoluted route through a dense, overgrown virtual city. With the simplest tools — ruler, pencil, ballpoint pen and technical pen — Kay builds a maze of buildings and a chain of spaces, layer on layer, inside and out.

Fredrik made a point of it: "Even with a funding system as good as Norway's, artists have to fight to keep working this way. The system was built by politicians, and politicians know nothing about art — they can stop it whenever they like. So artists have to stay wide awake while they work, and keep reminding politicians, through their own work or through social action, that we need this support."

Xiong Liang never went to university; he taught himself. He began by drawing picture books for adults — "strange, out-of-bounds stuff," as he calls it — and turned to children's picture books after his daughter was born. Mao Yimin, a partner in Xiong Liang's studio, told QDaily that publishers fight over the rights to his well-known children's books. But 《寻暗集》, an adaptation of a stage story that took him seven years and earned him a 2015 nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration, is still losing money.

"What's particular about China is that you get no support at all, so everyone runs into harsher problems. The older you get — ten years is easy enough to keep your confidence through, after twenty you're not so sure, after thirty it's hard to say. But I don't really know. I think everyone just has to work like mad, because the thing you love takes double the effort."

Imi Maufe was born in Norfolk, England, in 1974, and has lived in Bergen since 2009.

After cycling across Iceland, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Norway and Denmark, with a line from an Icelandic friend in her ears — "You are only ever one decision away from everything" — Imi gave up a promising career as a landscape architect and began her life as an artist.

Her main medium is the hand-printed conceptual artist's book, a practice that carries on a childhood habit of making visual diaries of family holidays. For Imi, a book is how an audience takes part in art — holding it, reading it, talking about it. A book is a physical thing within reach.

In her latest work, 36 Tunnels and a Ferry, she records a five-hour bus ride from Bergen to Lærdal in western Norway. She leaves out the fjords and mountains and attends purely to every tunnel the bus passes through, and to their poetic names. The book is hand-printed, cut and folded from two sheets of paper; it stretches and contracts in your hands like a spring, and set down on a table it becomes a tunnel itself.

She also brought a set of "books you can eat," with text carved into crispbread, a traditional Nordic food.

"An art book is also a private way of recording things, an outlet for what you feel and go through," Yi Lei told QDaily. "Anyone can try it — start with a travel journal, say. Children especially. Instead of facing a computer all day or only taking pictures with a phone, they can actually sit still and sort themselves out. We all need that process of quieting down and getting rid of the restlessness."

Yi Lei and Yu Wenhou started Northing by making art books themselves. Yi Lei is a contributing writer for Art World, one of China's largest-circulation art magazines. In 2015 they made a Norway-themed issue for Snacks (《零食》), the magazine's supplement, its 26th, and, following the supplement's custom of choosing three keywords, picked "down the mountain, onto the road, into the city."

Yu Wenhou told QDaily: "From any point in Bergen you're walking into the mountains in under 20 minutes. Across the whole country, the commonest way to take a holiday is to be in the mountains — just to stay there. We wanted to express one idea: we usually think of the city as standing outside nature, opposed to it, but that's an illusion. The city is part of nature. It's only a form of dwelling that we humans made."

Åshild Kanstad Johnsen said her work does well in Japan, where readers take her to stand for a certain "Norwegian style." At home in Norway, people don't see it that way at all.

Åshild grew up on a hillside among the mountains around Bergen. Bergen's weather and terrain shaped the way she looks at things and made her one of the best-known Norwegian illustrators abroad. Kubbe Makes a Museum (《木娃的博物馆》) came out in China in 2014 from Beijing Normal University Press. The Kubbe series has been exhibited in Japan and was turned into an animated short by the studio Echoes.

Fredrik said: "People probably assume Norwegian art has to be sad, melancholy, held in. But when an artist is actually making something, they're bound to steer away from that popular, follow-the-crowd style and push their own character as far as it will go."

Taking his cue from the pet of a minor character in David Lynch's classic series Twin Peaks — a length of log — Åshild created a log boy named Kubbe, who loves collecting all sorts of things. He opens a museum, publishes a big photo album, and stages an unorthodox concert played entirely on odd homemade instruments.

Gunvor Rasmussen's The Monster Book and The Fairy Tale Book were translated into Chinese and published in China in 2017.

She runs a one-person studio and gallery in an old wooden house on the Bryggen wharf, a World Heritage site. In 2007 an editor at the publisher Skald came to her, and together they planned a five-book set of children's stories in Nynorsk. Nine years later she had finished five full-color, entirely hand-illustrated children's books holding close to 100 new stories; two of them won that year's Silver Award for Norway's Most Beautiful Book and the Nynorsk children's literature prize.

Her illustrations swarm with strange creatures: monsters of every kind, animals out of myth, princes and princesses, vampires and zombies, dwarves and elves. She likes the collision of innocence and darkness, and the humor that comes out of it. She rarely draws pupils in her characters' eyes.

She has also used fairy-tale posters against the "white supremacist" symbols that turned up in her own neighborhood: "I resist the spread of extremist groups in my own way."

Xiong Liang said: "I hear this question everywhere — what is Chinese style, this cultural anxiety particular to China. I go to a lot of international events, and my own work has turned into a form of cultural diplomacy. I agree completely with what people here have said: in an exhibition, the individual comes first and matters most."

The exhibition closed on a Saturday. Fredrik ran a workshop called Zine Machine. Sixteen people sat shoulder to shoulder around a long table and passed 16 sheets of paper down the line, switching every three minutes, each person drawing whatever they wanted. The sheets were bound into a zine, its cover lettered in green brush calligraphy: 《迷志机器》, "Zine Machine." A few children sitting nearby made one of their own.

Images from the Shicha WeChat official account and bergenzines.