He uses all the materials imaginable to create his own magical universe: miniature apartments, clothes, furniture, food, cakes, stuffed animals and even swimming pools and bathrooms. It is a world compressed into a dollhouse, with characters made as if they were made of plasticine and where something happens in each space. And when he has everything ready, he photographs it a thousand times, until he obtains the image he needs to put together his story. It is the way of working of the South Korean children’s author Heena Baek (Seoul, 1971), an unknown creator in our parts of whom unfortunately we would have known little or nothing if she had not won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the most prestigious award, in 2020. from the world of children’s literature.
Since then, the Kókinos publishing house has been bringing us closer to his work, a total of eight titles so far. I am a dog is the latest published, where the author proposes a fun, simple and sensational point of view of a dog. The narrative follows a day in the life of the pet, who, far from pondering or launching great reflections, is simply dedicated to playing the dog: barking, sniffing, running, defecating and waiting. A lot.
“I never thought I would be able to create stories, but I always liked to fantasize about it when I was a child,” the author, an avid reader of Beatrix Potter when she was little, tells La Vanguardia. She studied Technological Education at Ewha Women’s University and, after graduating, she went to the United States to study Animation at the California School of the Arts in 1997. This training has been decisive in her work, the pages of whose books seem taken directly of cinema. A unique fusion of formats that was also highlighted by the award jury, which in its ruling described her books as “suggestive miniature worlds” that open the door to “the extraordinary.”
Magic, realism and culture come together in titles like The Water Fairy or the multi-award-winning The Magic Candy. The first, closely linked to the Korean custom of going to traditional baths, where a girl, Dokyi, who does not really want her mother to scrub her skin to the point of skinning, appears to a strange old woman who will turn out to be be a water fairy.
In The Magic Candies, a lonely boy finds some marbles that are actually candies that allow him to know the thoughts of those around him, including his dog, and with which he becomes aware of his place in the world. It is precisely this title that launched her to international fame with an award that arrived like May rain, in the midst of a legal battle over copyright. “When I was a newcomer, I transferred the copyright of my first illustrated book, Cloud Bread, to a publisher. I received the award during the legal battle to recover them and I felt like a salvation, because it came at a time when I felt like I gave up everything for lost. It was an award that allowed me to continue creating, to continue living as a writer,” she says honestly.
Baek’s intention is not to create “art books.” For her, the most important thing is the story, a good story: “I think the most important thing in a book is the story, and all the elements – the physical components of the book, the images, the text – are tools to tell that story. , and I use those tools to decide how to tell the story.”
Singular atmospheres, powerful and curious stories, where photographs capture reality and fantasy in equal parts. In Cloud Bread, for example, two kitten brothers – who are two paper cutouts wearing fabric dresses – find a small cloud stuck in the branches of a tree that they take to their mother, who after kneading and baking it, turns it into a a magical bread capable of making the whole family fly. A debut book, but one that made a dent in the Korean publishing industry, whose children’s segment continues to be dominated by imported titles.
Although she puts creativity before everything, she does not forget the work, the intermediate process before obtaining a great result, a process that for her is marked by a childhood full of puppets, drawings and cut-outs. She also assumes that she was certainly a lonely child, something that is reflected in her books: “I always got lost in my thoughts and I liked to play alone. I would draw all day or play with my dolls making up stories. “I think playing like that all the time was the starting point of my life as a storyteller.”
A loneliness that also transcends the limits of the pages, as the Astrid Lindgren jury noted: “With an exquisite sense for materials, memories and gestures, her filmic picture books stage stories about the loneliness of children, the encounters and the collective spirit.” “We are all alone, but we live together, and I think that no matter how the world changes or what happens to us in life, we can do a little better living together,” adds Heena Baek from her home in South Korea.
