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shaun tan art

Shaun Tan - "TV Room (That’s It)" - oil on canvas

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TV Room (That’s It)

Oil on canvas by Shaun Tan (2012).

Artwork size: 86 x 76 cm (33.9" x 29.9")

Frame size: 88.5 x 78.5 x 4.7 cm (34.8" x 30.9" x 1.9")


"This is arguably the only realistic (instead of surreal) painting in the book, tuning things back to a more prosaic reality. All fantasy is relegated to children’s drawings pinned to walls, scattered on the floor, and some other fiction playing unseen on a television that glows unusually brightly, it’s not unlike a setting sun. Outside it is evening, and we can just see a crow take wing in the distance. An interesting point about this composition is that the sky would not be visible from this angle, so this maintains a slightly dreamlike feeling to an otherwise normal scene. It’s a quiet, low-key way to end a story, without flourish or message, the way I often like to do."

"It’s also quite a personally nostalgic image. I probably spent most time with my own brother watching TV or playing computer games on a beanbag in the late 70s and early 80s. Much like the fishing mentioned earlier, this was an ideal way for two boys to spend time together. Although we might not have conversed much, we enjoyed another kind of communion of thought and feeling through television, games and books. This TV set also looks very much like our own from that time, a black and white tube which took about a minute to warm up with a high-pitched sound akin to tinnitus. You’d always hear the disturbing Dr Who intro music long before the image burned onto the screen."

"In my memory this is the way most family conflicts would resolve. Not by overt apology or discussion, but instead we would just end up doing something together. The action itself was quite arbitrary, but revealed some deeper continuity or meaning, in a way that is quite hard to explain rationally. Pictures can sometimes summarise those unspoken feelings well. A musician friend, Sxip Shirey, who worked to develop a soundscape for the app version of this story (sadly no longer available) put it very well when he said that it’s like the TV ‘is singing a future memory of one another back to them.’ One thing I do like about picture books, and art in general, is the feeling of collapsed time that sometimes happens, where past, present and future come together. On reflection, this is not just a ‘story’ about childhood or even sibling relationships, but something more like a daydream about broader successes and failures that come with trying to understand our connections with other human beings." —Shaun Tan

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