Artist Zuo Hsuan has received recognition for her visual storytelling in comic book form, and now she’s using her skills to help a historic site in her hometown.
The Daxi Wood Art Ecomuseum, located in northern Taiwan’s Taoyuan City, adopted an innovative marketing approach by partnering with Zuo to appeal to a younger audience. The museum invited her to design cartoon characters for each of its 10 renovated heritage buildings in 2020; the characters were then made into life-size freestanding figures and placed near the entrance to each building to greet visitors.
Characters created by Zuo for each of the ecomuseum’s renovated heritage buildings reflect their past or current use.
Zhan Ya-ru, a project assistant at DWAE’s Education and Promotion Section, said the characters add vitality to the historic spaces because visitors love to pose with them and collect cards featuring them. The project assistant added that cooperating with Zuo enabled the museum to develop marketing materials with a certain flair.
“Zuo’s refreshing style exudes elegance and sophistication through its beautiful color combinations,” Zhan said. “She excels in creating ingenious layouts that make people look closely at the details.”
Founded in 2015, DWAE highlights the area’s centuries-old woodworking tradition through workshops, educational displays and audiovisual visitor guides about local culture and history. The open-air museum is composed of a cluster of historic structures built during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945) and repurposed as craft classrooms, exhibition halls and studios.
Zuo’s cheery cartoons appear on festive door decorations and cards to make appealing souvenirs.
Zuo’s previous work clearly demonstrates her affinity for Taiwan’s past. The talented artist’s first comic, “The Summer Temple Fair,” was a hit, winning bronze at the 2017 Japan International MANGA Award and selling translation rights to French, Italian, Japanese and Vietnamese publishers.
The two-volume story tells the story of a university student returning to his hometown to conduct a field study of a long-running religious festival. The visit evokes long-forgotten memories and enables him to reconnect with family and childhood friends.
Zuo’s 2018 creation “What She Put on the Table” tells the tale of famous cookbook author and television personality Fu Pei-mei’s rise to fame, while the 2022 work “The Banana Sprout” was commissioned by Taipei City-based National Taiwan Normal University for its centenary celebration. The story gives readers a glimpse of a free and bohemian period of campus life at Taihoku (Taipei) High School—NTNU’s predecessor—in the 1930s. (E) (By Kelly Her)
Zuo (right) and fellow comic artist Chang Sheng promote comics from Taiwan in 2022 at Europe’s biggest annual pop culture festival, Lucca Comics & Games in Italy.
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(This article is adapted from Drawing from Experience in the March/April 2023 issue of Taiwan Review. The Taiwan Review archives dating to 1951 are available online.)