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Contemporary Visual Culture and Art

Visualizing Childhood: Multimodal Artistic Strategies in Suzy Lee’s <i>Shadow </i>and Shaun Tan’s <i>The Arrival</i>

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.63385/cvca.v1i2.220

Keywords:

Childhood and Migration, Ethics of Representation, Intermediality, Multimodality, Picturebooks, Visual Culture

Abstract

This article examines contemporary picturebooks as part of visual culture and as agents in the cultural construction of childhood. Drawing on multimodality, intermediality and visual culture studies, it proposes a visually oriented framework for analysing how images, page design and narrative structures shape meaning in children’s literature. The study combines qualitative multimodal close reading with an interdisciplinary case-study approach focusing on Suzy Lee’s wordless picturebook, Shadow and Shaun Tan’s graphic narrative, The Arrival. Using operationalised categories of layout, framing, colour, panel transitions and intermedial references, the analysis traces how both works stage thresholds, silence and embodied movement, and how they invite readers to negotiate experiences of play, trauma, migration and otherness. The findings show that these texts construct childhood as both vulnerable and agentic, while also foregrounding ethical questions about who is seen, by whom and under which visual regimes. The article argues that a visually oriented approach can support educators, librarians and curators in designing age-appropriate mediations of demanding picturebooks and in addressing issues of inequality, displacement and memory without resorting to didactic simplification. In doing so, it positions children’s literature as a significant site of cultural imagination and critical discourse in the twenty-first century.

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