Liang Xiong: China ⋆ Illustrator

"The eyes of children need exposure to beauty in the world, but this does not mean they cannot accept the concept of darkness."

Liang Xiong

Liang Xiong was born in Jiaxing, Zheijiang in 1975, and developed an artistic passion at the age of ten. With no formal training, Xiong taught himself Chinese ink painting and practiced in his own studio throughout his childhood. After finishing high school, he worked as a laborer, designer, and foreign trade businessperson, but he continued with his art throughout his early career. Xiong began his first serious illustration project, illustrations for The Complete Collection of Lu Xun, in 1992, and the project is still underway. In 2000, he began contributing regularly to various literary magazines, and by 2001 he began seriously drawing again.

While Xiong's drawings typically emphasize darkness and lines, he also has a deep understanding of color and blending. His picturebooks are overflowing with stunning detail and rich, engaging imagery. Just as he focuses detailed attention on his characters, he also illustrates setting in vivid, pains-taking detail. Xiong is an innovative thinker—he resists traditional, overly-infantile children's book themes, and trusts his young readers to draw their own conclusions from his illustrations. While he acknowledges that traditional, moralistic children's texts have benefited children throughout history, he also believes that children should not be sheltered from darkness and death. Opening a child's mind to these difficult issues, he suggests, provides deeper experiences with kindness, truth, and love, and provides the child reader with a better sense of his or her own future. While his illustrations do project an eerie, dark impression, his subtle use of color and creative imagination captivates his child readers and draws them into the depths of the stories.

Since 2005, Xiong has won a number of literary awards for his children's book illustrations. He won the China Times Best Children's Book of the Year Award for The Little Stone Lion in 2005, China's Most Beautiful Book of the Year Award for Lotus Back in 2008, and he recently made the list for the 10 Best Books by the Beijing News Weekly Magazine for The Monster of Monsoon. He was also invited to illustrate a bicentennial edition of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales by the Hans Christian Andersen Fund in Denmark in 2005.