Early in her career, Yudori enjoyed telling stories of uprooted Asian women. For children of the empire (Delcourt, 224 pages, 20.50 euros), For his new series, the artist has chosen to return to his homeland, South Korea. In this first volume full of distinction, he sets his story in Gyeongseong, which is not yet Seoul, in 1929, during the Japanese occupation. There, two teenagers reach an agreement, not without friction: Arisa Jo, a rich bourgeois woman imbued with Western modernity, and Jun Seomoon, a traditionalist heir to the declassified rural aristocracy.
In this work, the feeling of strangeness linked to evolving in a Westernized terrain continues to reign, along with issues of racism and the fetishization of Asian women. Topics that resonate with her, as she lived in the Philippines when she was younger and immigrated to the United States alone several times after the age of 16. She trusts him World During a visit to France at the end of October, he intended to present his publication at the Quai des Bulles festival in Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine): “As I’ve moved around a lot, even within Korea, I don’t really have a place that feels like home. In America, I was completely alone, left to my own devices, like my Asian characters. »
Although her parents still live in Seoul today, the cartoonist, born in 1991, moved during the summer from Boston (United States) to Cambridge (United Kingdom) with her British husband and their cats. Now that’s where he gets to work on his comics, with one chapter completed in three weeks, from storyboard to color.
A rhythm that suits you. For nothing in the world would Yudori return to the precariousness and relentless pace imposed by webtoon platforms, popular comics for smartphones born in South Korea, which require delivering one chapter per week. The artist had to drop out of his third year of art school in New York and rush back to Seoul to honor his first series after winning a webtoon contest.
Colonialism and expatriation
In spring 2017 released in digital version. Pandora’s Choice (untranslated), which tells the story of a mixed-race girl and her alcoholic white father in the 19th century United States.my century. “When I was working on it, there wasn’t really a story that revolved around an Asian character. So I wrote what I wanted to read. » The rest of his career will be spent outside the Korean inner circle: “ Heaven to conquer [sa première BD imprimée, parue en 2022 et commandée par l’éditeur Delcourt] represents naked bodies. In South Korea, even if images containing nudity or are artistically made are given meaning, they must be sanitized, otherwise the book will be classified as pornography. So I’m not really targeting a Korean audience. »
You have 67.56% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
