FABLED KINGDOM BY QUEENIE CHAN

Artist"s Statement: BY QUEENIE CHAN

"As a practitioner of the 'ninth art' (comic strips), I am interested in bringing the narrative of comics - rather than just the art of comics - into art galleries. My approach makes me unusual among comic book artists, but I have always considered myself a 'writer who draws.' As such, I come with a unique viewpoint in how I regard my art, and the place art has in my work.

I'm interested in stories, and the ideas, symbols, archetypes and social critique that can exist in them. Comics involve art, but is really a medium for story-telling; the essence of the form is best expressed through sequential arrangement of a series of images and a blend of words and pictures. What is the best way to bring this into a gallery space? How can one distil the base ideas of a narrative into a form that is digestible on a gallery wall? These are all questions I want to ask.

Based in Sydney, Australia, I have been published both nationally and internationally, and had my work translated into multiple languages. I also run a start-up company called 'The BentoNet,' which has the goal of being an infinite bookshelf for independent book stores."

Biography GIVEN FROM: ARTSHINE INDUSTRIES

"Queenie Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1980, and by age three was a rabid fan of the Japanese comics and animation that was popular throughout Asia at the time. She spent her spare time imagining alternate endings, characters and scenarios to her favourite stories, and so a lifetime of storytelling was born even before she learned to lift a pencil.

When she was six years old, her family migrated to Australia. She settled in Sydney's inner west suburbs, where she remains to this day. She excelled in high school, and mostly enjoyed creative writing in English class, but never produced much art except for school projects. She didn't have much interest in drawing, until a miraculous flowering occurred when she was seventeen- midway through reading a manga best described as 'samurai soap opera,' it occurred to her that she could write and draw her own stories. This happened a year before she went on to study Information Systems at the University of NSW.

Drawing manga for a living was unthinkable for a girl from a traditional family who looked kindly on the arts, but who frowned upon the folly of trying to make a career out of it. In 2002, Queenie was due to graduate from her degree and into a lifetime of corporate servitude, when a stroke of good and bad luck happened - the dot com bust. With IT job opportunities evaporating, she turned to drawing, and through sheer random luck, she was discovered by an LA-based manga publisher called TOKYOPOP that was looking for international manga artists to address the manga boom in America at the time.

She went on to produce a manga called "The Dreaming" with them, a 3-volume mystery horror set in the Australian bush. It was successful and eventually translated into multiple languages. After that, she worked as an illustrator for best-selling author Dean Koontz on his wildly-popular "Odd Thomas" series, and with famed Australian fantasy author Kylie Chan on "Small Shen". Currently she is writing and drawing her own subversive fairytale-inspired story "Fabled Kingdom", of which book 3 will be out in April 2017.

In her spare time, Queenie runs a start-up company called "The BentoNet", which has the mission of connecting small presses with bookstores and libraries. Its ambition is to be an infinite bookstore for indie bookstores, and as a retailer, is run entirely off print-on-demand. "The BentoNet" is due to launch on June 25th."