WULOLIFE
"For Now" Author: Chen Pei-ling Publisher: China Friendship Publishing Company
"For Now" Author: Chen Pei-ling Publisher: China Friendship Publishing Company
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Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
9 plain but profound daily lives in modern Taipei, their urban whispers
Natural brushstrokes capture fleeting moments of life
The essence of blue, gray and ink, you and I running around in the city
Stay here for your own reasons
Everyone is a passerby, and everyone is also a protagonist
🏆 Won
🔹 2021 Taipei International Book Fair Award, First Prize in Non-Fiction
🔹 The 11th Golden Comic Awards Annual Comic Award
🔹 Nominated author for the Newcomer Award at the Angoulême Comic Festival in France in 2015 and 2019
📖 Exquisite bare spine binding/ Special message from the author/ A double-page poster is included with the book
When I first conceived this comic book collection, I set it to be women between the ages of 20 and 35. Most of them are not married like me, and I can also better understand what girls of this age would think from my own perspective.
—— Chen Pei-ling
🔵 Editor's Recommendation
◎A rising Taiwanese female cartoonist who stands out with her unique painting and narrative style.
Chen Pei-ling is a creator who explores realistic themes. In an interview, she said that she dislikes falsehood and is afraid of boredom. She believes that ordinary life is composed of the relationships between many people, and she is like solving a puzzle, then disassembling and analyzing it.
"For Now" is a work that is a mixture of what she sees and hears in her daily life. She uses her own and her friends' real experiences as inspiration, and captures the city's cultural features into her work. She records the moments of life on the streets in a semi-autobiographical form, and steps slowly into the half-asleep and half-awake Taipei: commuters who survive in the city, single women who enjoy slow cooking on weekends, and friends who complain about their partners' laxity and loneliness in a foreign land...
This book breaks away from the style of mainstream comics. Its restrained narrative technique and simple and casual composition work in perfect harmony. Through familiar street scenes and casual conversations, it lightly but profoundly outlines a story of a Taipei woman with unique aura and charm.
◎9 ups and downs of the city, 9 unfixed life styles. From the plain and trivial urban chatter, we can smell the taste of cherishing the present.
The content of each chapter in the book is plain and ordinary, but solid and meaningful. It does not present the ups and downs or the coincidences in life, but is more like a gentle way for ordinary people to find the greatest common divisor of life. In the days that follow, one "temporary" follows another, gradually forming a continuous action. There are probably these small fragments in life, short but precious; life flows between movement and stillness, cold and warm, indifferent but immortal. Please appreciate this work as if holding a magnifying glass.
◎Cool blue-grey tones, clean and neat lines, casual daily conversations... Beneath the calm and cold picture lies the poetry hidden in real life.
Chen Pei-ling uses pencils, colored pencils and watercolors to apply casual and concise lines. Low-saturation, low-brightness watercolor Payne's Gray and navy blue are layered to create dark tones, while the casual additions of turquoise and red break the coolness of the cold picture, ultimately completing a depiction of a city that is both cold and warm.
The speed of the day is condensed into each frame, and the plain and real colors extract the vivid and friendly little people. When you slowly flip through this book, you can feel the delicate emotions that stretch out at the end of the alley and the street corner, and you will also see those moments of life that are exposed to the air and the sun, but have not deteriorated.
◎ The book is bound in an exquisite bare spine that can be laid flat at 180 degrees. It includes the author's special message to mainland readers, and comes with a beautiful double-page poster of the text.
This book is composed of various small stories about the city, so the overall binding concept is set as "treating the book into a city."
- The outer cover uses a large wide-angle lens image, and the title is hot-stamped.
- On the inner cover, which looks like a cement wall, the characters in the book are presented using silk screen printing technology.
- The lining printed with gradient ink is like the story in the book, deep and gentle.
- The binding method uses open spine binding, which allows the book to be completely flattened when reading without any obstacles, so that you can appreciate all the details in the book.
⚫️ Introduction
Working people commuting to work, single women enjoying cooking alone, two besties making wishes together, cat feeders meeting on the street at night... This is a work describing urban life. The author records the daily moments on the streets of Taipei in a semi-autobiographical form. The seemingly plain and casual conversations in the book can make people deeply feel the alienation and self-adaptation of urban life, as well as the unique tone and demeanor of urban women.
🟡 Recommended
This graphic novel masterpiece delicately reflects the empathy of daily life in Taiwan. The narrative rhythm with both warmth and coldness, the precise storyboards, and the strong personal painting style make the story present a kind of "even if it is written into a novel or filmed, it is difficult to present it as well as this book" - this fullness. If everyone in the city is a passerby, but will become the protagonist at a certain moment, then "For the time being, let's do this" is a gentle and clever footnote!
—— 2021 Taipei International Book Fair Grand Prize Jury
I had a very good reading experience from "For Now", which was full of subtle feelings, like savoring a cup of tea in my hand, and of course, the cat lying on my lap.
—— BDGest book review website
When I first saw her work, I knew that it was important that she painted something she knew, not something she imagined, and I knew I could trust her.
— Thomas Gabison, Actes Sud, editor of the French edition of Somnolence
In this short, somewhat difficult moment in life, every frame has details that are worth magnifying. The reading process is very pleasant. If the content of the book is used as a metaphor, it is a can of well-pickled transparent radishes extracted from a huge slice of time.
—— Original Preface
About the Author · · · · · ·
Chen Pei-ling, an illustrator, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts of Taiwan Normal University. In recent years, she has tried to create graphic novels. "For Now" is her first graphic novel. She has published children's books and picture books. Most of her creative themes come from trivial things in daily life. The usual steps are to first write a text narrative and then visualize it. She has drawn book covers such as "What is Violence?", illustrations for books such as "Maybe You Are Not a Special Child" and "A Strange Dad Came to the Island", and created picture books such as "Always Lying Down and Sleeping" and "The Eel is King". In 2015 and 2016, she was shortlisted for the American "3×3" magazine illustration yearbook twice. In 2016, she served as a resident cartoonist for the resident exchange program of the Angoulême International Comics and Image City in France. In 2019, she was selected for the Nami Island Illustration Exhibition in South Korea. From 2021 to 2022, she served as a resident cartoonist for the resident cooperation program of the bd BOUM Comics House in Blois.
