物質想像：幾米視覺藝術中的童年與天際幻想曲

Abstract

This short paper interprets a series of poetic picture books by Jimmy Liao, an internationally famous Taiwanese artist, from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard's theories on the imagination of matter and poetic reverie, as presented in Bachelard's Air and Dreams, Water and Dreams, The Poetics of Reverie, The Right to Dream. With reference to Bachelard's ideas, I will attempt to penetrate deeper into Jimmy's Secrets in the Woods, Thank You, Furry Bunny, for a Wonderful Afternoon, The Blue Stone, Sound of Colors, The Moon Forgets and A Fish With a Smile. These works present the recurrent themes of the search for lost innocence and the ecstasy of airy flight, water and the imagination. Bachelard's ideas on the imagination of matter find expression in Liao's The Blue Stone and The Moon Forgets, where images of air, water, stones, the moon and stars all appear in a state of cosmic delight. In Liao's art, this imagination of matter has its central themes of restoring childhood innocence and striving through poetic reverie toward the spiritual ecstasy of nature and the cosmic imagination. His stories are indirect critiques of patriarchy, rigid rationality and rationalist ideology. In the spiritual process of enjoying poetic reverie, the phenomenon of "becoming animals, becoming fish, becoming rabbits, and becoming stars or moon," also corresponds to the Deleuze's theories, in which affect, associated with the creative arts expresses inexhaustible creative immanence as we embrace the Other or the Unknown. This Otherness as childhood innocence is not, in fact, a psychological regression into the past: it refers to a threshold state that opens up into a future life.