From the American countryside to smalltown Taiwan, from past decades to modern times, artist Michael Leu uses his personal immigration experience to translate the Taiwan he recalls into a trip through time captured on paper.

In the mid-1980s, Michael Leu left Taipei, his home of more than thirty years, and moved to San Francisco in the United States. When he returned to Taiwan many years later, Taipei was like another world, the home of his youth nothing but a decades-old memory. This experience gave him the idea of recording memories with a brush, resulting in the picture book Time Sketch.

In the book’s first few pages, a boy wearing a white baseball hat naps in a boat on the Mississippi River. The boat drifts downriver into a mysterious cave filled with stalactites and stalagmites. When the boat exits the cave, the boy wakes up and finds himself in Taiwan’s remote, sparsely populated countryside. Following in the boy’s footsteps as he travels from a small village to a large city, the reader enjoys a bird’s-eye view of Taiwan’s rural life of the 1950s and 60s, then the hustle and bustle of urban people and cars. In the final pages, we follow him through the main gate of a traditional house into modern Taipei, where the boy, who now has the face of an older man, dozes off on the subway.

Using incredibly fine brushwork, Leu depicts realistic scenes recalled from memory in an approach that brings to mind an imaginative “collage”. Street scenes and buildings from different memories, regions, and time are often juxtaposed on the same page, while the sleeping boy brings a dreamlike quality to the experience. In the last dozen or so pages, the artist explains his creative concept and provides some additional information for scenes that have almost entirely disappeared today. These interesting details are sure to add to the reader’s enjoyment.