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Bianco Tsai: The Illustrator With Temperature
snippet of Tsai's solo show in Tokyo
2/Jan/2023
Written By: Zoey Chang, Artist and writer
In the overly industrialised and digitalised environment of illustration industry, being an illustrator that held temperature and smell dearer than the sleekness of vectors has set Bianco Tsai apart from most of her peers, persistence accompanies her from more than fifteen years ago on her journey as a illustrator that primarily work with physical materials. In her illustrations, we can see life, culture, and beauty in ordinary happenings.
Bianco's interpretation of a black cat
Bianco in london
She recognises the unsettling feeling of the sterility of digital material, and decides against it. Albeit speed is valued more when it comes to content creating, the unique softness in her brush strokes is irreplaceable. Combined with the playfulness in her approach to shapes and colours, she creates paintings and drawings that are highly skilled in terms of composition, colour combination and surface treatment with dynamic material choices.
The content of her illustration is vast like the sea, from various findings from her travelings, to imaginary animals that sooth the mind.
Objects with history often find their way to her paintings, antique metal matchboxes, mini hand blown glass bottles, old stamps etc, she incorporate them into her artworks, and enable us to travel through both space and time to somewhere distant, yet intimate enough to get a glimpse of the past. She has the abilities to replicate the feeling of the object without overworking the picture, hence keeping it authentic, she is illustrating the soul, rather than the surface.
Animals and children has always been a primary subject for Bianco. As a mother of two, she constantly tangos between the roles of a stern guardian and a playful child, she documents her children's play and the cuisines made for the family, wrote an illustration book on the relation of parenting and food, and introduced many parents a more liberal way to consider parenting and communicating with their children on the dining table. Besides publishing a parenting book, she's also a columnist for Arts and Crafts in Future Parenting--a organisation dedicated to children's literature and media under Commonwealth Magazine, she organised numerous kids friendly art workshops for both the parents and the child to participate, introduce them to the joy of multimedia art from a young age.
Outside of her parental responsibilities, she travels around the world with her illustrations, participating in fairs and exhibitions. She has had almost ten shows featuring her paintings and photographs throughout her career, and collected great success.
The content of her illustration is vast like the sea, from various findings from her travelings, to imaginary animals that sooth the mind.
Objects with history often find their way to her paintings, antique metal matchboxes, mini hand blown glass bottles, old stamps etc, she incorporate them into her artworks, and enable us to travel through both space and time to somewhere distant, yet intimate enough to get a glimpse of the past. She has the abilities to replicate the feeling of the object without overworking the picture, hence keeping it authentic, she is illustrating the soul, rather than the surface.
Animals and children has always been a primary subject for Bianco. As a mother of two, she constantly tangos between the roles of a stern guardian and a playful child, she documents her children's play and the cuisines made for the family, wrote an illustration book on the relation of parenting and food, and introduced many parents a more liberal way to consider parenting and communicating with their children on the dining table. Besides publishing a parenting book, she's also a columnist for Arts and Crafts in Future Parenting--a organisation dedicated to children's literature and media under Commonwealth Magazine, she organised numerous kids friendly art workshops for both the parents and the child to participate, introduce them to the joy of multimedia art from a young age.
Outside of her parental responsibilities, she travels around the world with her illustrations, participating in fairs and exhibitions. She has had almost ten shows featuring her paintings and photographs throughout her career, and collected great success.
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Bianco in Tokyo
Bianco's illustrations of urban critters
She is constantly invited to collaborate with authors and editors for her illustrations, so far, more than thirty books that publishes worldwide feature her illustrations
