Love Letters from the Monsters
妖怪情書
Overview
Rights sold: China
Faced with monsters everywhere in her life, the little girl grows a horn and a tail and becomes a strange girl. To the long-necked fish monster, she says: “What do you fear? Is it the way I look or the way you look, or your heart?” To the mushroom monster: “It’s nothing, just an afternoon where there is nothing. You should know that doubt and trust are created at the same time.” These conversations obviously point to something, perhaps an unpleasant, minute detail in your life or mine, or hers. Throughout the dialogues and pictures, the little girl grows stronger. And how does the story end? The author leaves us with a deeply healing scene, waiting for us to find the answers together.
When the sixteen-year-old girl picked up the drawing paint brush, she drew monsters dug up from the deepest corners of her innocent heart. Within a growing body lives a small child. Ena Chang’s monsters do not terrify; they are monsters begot from emotions, their appearances nothing but the crystallization of the paradoxical emotions of love, hate, adoration and grudges in our hearts.
Author(s)
A home-schooled girl who has always learned outside of the establishment. At her age of 15, she drew a little girl and a monster. Then she drew more, and then more. At first, she posted the drawings on her Facebook page. The monsters, although big and ugly, were adorable. Instead of being frightened by the monsters, some of her friends found them to be healing. She is delighted that her work has been accepted, and even more delighted that they have a healing effect. In Love Letters from the Monsters, Ena Chang projects familial love, friendship and romantic love onto these monsters in a work that she says reflects her wild adolescent emotions. Her works were exhibited in Garden City bookstore in 2018.
Praises
“Through Ena’s brush, the monsters are depicted in all their loneliness, betrayal, timidness, disappointment, depression, hesitation, hurt, alienation, rejection, bondage, jealousy... The melancholy and sense of confinement touch the hearts of sentient beings with such poignancy. We become entangled in feelings because of her monsters, for we too have experienced those emotions….
However, through deftly exploring and communicating, perhaps also through arguments and mockery, the old soul in this teenage girl guides her through this journey to eventually find light. Worth noting is that because of her lack of affectation, Ena’s drawings are devoid of deliberateness and manipulation, instead filled with frank exchanges and headstrong declarations. These are the ways that she has touched us with her youthfulness, carrying a freshness that cannot be learned by someone who has seen the all-too-real vicissitudes of life.” --Ena’s no.1 fan