Pei-hsin Cho
Winner of the International Award for Illustration Bologna Children’s Book Fair-Fundación SM 2021
This exhibition showcases illustrations created by Pei-hsin Cho – the 2021 Taiwanese winner of the 11th International Bologna Children’s Book Fair-Fundación SM Award for Illustration – for her picturebook El Pescador y su Alma, based on the text by Oscar Wilde.
The book was commissioned as part of the prize, established to discover talented under-35 illustrators featured in the Illustrators Exhibition, along with €15,000 in financial support via a cheque from the Fundación SM.
The winner is asked to create a picturebook based on a classical tale or legend from his/her own country for publication by SM. That book is launched the following year at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair; the original illustrations are shown in a solo exhibition dedicated to the illustrator.
The 2021’s Jury made of Claudia Zoe Bedrick (Enchanted Lion, USA), Harry Gwinner (Nobrow/Flying Eyes, UK) and Teresa Tellechea (Grupo SM, Spain) stated:
“We chose Pei-Hsin Cho for the SM Award because of the energy of her line and her richly layered sense of space––and of the page. Her work is unusual, with perspectives that invite the viewer into both the expansiveness of space and the depths of a character's inner realm. There is abundant promise here, with Cho, young as she is, boldly exploring and visually recording forms and feelings in ways that surprise, thereby inviting the eye to linger on the world that she delineates and opens for us to see”.
Pei-Hsin is a Taiwanese visual storyteller with a particular focus on illustration and animation, currently based in London. Her work is narrative-based that challenges the possibilities in visual storytelling. She combines traditional and digital mediums to create delicate and atmospheric animations and illustrations. Her work depicts a variety of inward feelings that attempt to transcribe subtle emotions into tangible and visually tactile images. Personal sentiments are always present in Pei’s work, wrapped with rational narration to catalyse unaccessible subjective experiences and memory fragments.