Iwa ni Hana

Eno. (who is also known as 何何舞) is my favorite illustrator of all time. She published her first artbook in 2007 under the title "Marquee Moon" (华盖之月). Above is an image from a series of drawings called "night of sublimation" dated from 2004 - 2006 and collected in that artbook.

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iiiis is a talented male artist in the PRC who is involved in music production as well as art illustrations. He is known for his soft, ethereal and graceful artstyle and has won many awards. Like another contemporary artist Eno, he follows the technical concept of 計白當黑 (ji bai dang hei) in traditional Chinese paintings. The idea is to leave blanks in a painting, and yet the blanks do not mean that the painting is incomplete. On the contrary, the blanks are part of the completed painting. In this way, not only the material world of touchable things is depicted, but also the immaterial world of void.

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New artbook of the PRC illustrator Eno. (何何舞)

Cover image of Eno's artbook 'Marquee Moon'

News reached me that Eno’s new artbook entitled Anemone (银莲花) is to go on sale early next month. This is her second artbook since Marquee Moon (华盖之月).

Eno. is by far my favorite illustrator these days. I adore that androgynous, ethereal beauty and that delicate, graceful touch in her illustrations. I see that she is also trying her hand at manhua these days – namely a series entitled Ling Miao Qian (零秒前), which seems to be a sports series set in a Chinese high school.* (Personally, I wish it had been a manhua series set in premodern China, so that you get to see in spades the sort of beautiful, flowing black hair which she is so good drawing. But that’s just me.)

Earlier last year, she also did a series of illustrations on the theme of Lan Ling Wang (兰陵王), a prince of the kingdom of Qi (齊) who lived in 6th century China. According to legend, he was a skilled soldier, but his extraordinary and somewhat feminine good looks did not seem to strike much terror into the hearts of his enemies. So he devised these scary-looking masks to wear on the battlefield. His siblings were jealous of him; he was poisoned and died at the young age of 30 or thereabouts.

One of Eno's illustrations of Lan Ling Wang

Rumour has it that the novelist Tanaka Yoshiki (田中芳樹) also has a work in progress on the theme of Lan Ling Wang.** If the novel(s) – assuming they are not aborted efforts (as is so often the case with Tanaka Yoshiki) – were illustrated by Eno., that would be quite something to behold indeed.

* You can see the details from her blog here: ttp://blog.sina.com.cn/enoeno

** You can see the details from his editor’s blog here: ttp://a-hiro.cocolog-nifty.com/diary/2009/02/post-ae8d.html

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