Catherine Louis

Liu and the Bird

«Après quelques heures de marche, j’ai rencontré un enfant au bord d’une rivière. Il traçait des signes sur des galets avec la pointe brûlée d’un bâton.»

In a dream, Liu is visited by a bird – and she sees her grandfather. The next day, the little Chinese girl decides to look for him, letting herself be guided by signs: down by the river she receives a charred staff, the river leads her through the forest and the tip of the thrown staff shows her the way through the fields. A woman shares her meal with Liu, and a man sitting under a tree calls her attention to the bird on top of the mountains. When Liu reaches the summit, the bird is long gone, but its tracks in the snow and a feather lead her to an old man in the bamboo forest, who shows Liu the shortcut to her grandfather’s house. He, in turn, has been expecting her, since he heard the voice of love from afar. With a large brush that Liu receives from him, the girl paints her path up to where the bird was. Just as she finishes, the bird frees itself from the page and flies off across the land ...
In the style of Chinese ink paintings, Catherine Louis has created wonderful linocut pictures that harmonise well with the texts. Clear contours arise from the sheer coloured paper, while signs from the story are framed in little boxes, like pictograms. In simple steps they converge into the respective Chinese characters, making them easily readable be the likes of us.
A magical journey from reality to Chinese calligraphy.

(Loretta van Oordt, translation by Simon Froehling)
Source: SIKJM

Translation of title: Liu et l’oiseau

North-South Books, New York 2006

ISBN: 978-0-7358-2050-0