Reading time: 5 minutes
“I’m a storyteller and an observer. And I don’t want to pretend to be someone I’m not.” Mu Pan (Taichung City, 1976) is unequivocal. Visual tales are intrinsic to human experience, the places we go to discover new worlds and make sense of the one we live in. “If that’s illustration, then so be it,” says the Brooklyn-based artist, whose first museum retrospective, Mu Pan and Other Beasts, is showing at Espacio SOLO Madrid.
Visual narrative makes a comeback
Visual narrative, as Mu Pan’s comments indicate, continues to spark conflicting reactions. With the advent of abstraction in the 20th century, many avant garde artists rejected figuration and storytelling, while hugely influential art critics such as Clement Greenberg laid the academic foundations for viewing visual narrators as second-class artists.
In recent years, however, storytelling has been making a comeback. Figurative artists such as