Shaun Tan

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Shaun Tan is one of Australia’s most widely acclaimed artists and authors, celebrated internationally for his drawings, oil paintings, picture books and his Academy Award-winning animated short, The Lost Thing. What is it about Tan’s work that accounts for his wide appeal? Perhaps it is the magic of his drawings that charmingly reconfigure the familiar into the unfamiliar. Perhaps it is the marriage of whimsical figures to bleak environments, images that invite the viewer (or reader) to consider more than what is seen directly in his artwork.

For Tan, simplicity does not mean an absence of sophistication, and it is...

For Tan, simplicity does not mean an absence of sophistication, and it is little wonder that so many find his visual explorations of ideas engaging.

View Shaun Tan's available original artworks below or browse his limited edition prints here. We also have a collection of Tan's observational oil sketches.

Tan’s works deal with themes of displacement, alienation and searching, as well as loneliness and depression. The more positive emotions, he notes, resolve themselves. But this is not to say this his work itself is depressing: there is hope and open-endedness in his art, an invitation for the viewer to use the work as a means of self-reflection. The words in his picture books are spare; indeed, Tan has noted that his words illustrate the artwork, which rather turns the concept of illustration on its head. His imagery communicates so much that Tan once answered an entire set of interview questions with pictures.

Not shy about acknowledging influences, Tan is in fact happy to note them: fairy tales, shows like The Twilight Zone, filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick and authors such as Ray Bradbury. Everyday life offers ideas to Tan: even a trip to the grocery store can provide impetus for creativity. In essence, people do a lot of things that are kind of weird when considered apart from the habits they’ve become, and Tan mines these tasks and reflects them back to us.

Tan creates hundreds of sketches a year, and some of his larger works arise from these. The Lost Thing, for example, began as a sketch of a crab imagined large; he added a man for the sake of scale, and the man seemed to be talking to the crab, and then Tan’s imagination took hold of that until several re-renderings yielded The Lost Thing. He notes that even though the creature in The Lost Thing is not a pet that we would recognise, the tale itself is familiar enough—a boy trying to help an animal find its home—that the reader can relate to it readily. Yet there is enough else in the imagery to invite other questions and perspectives, and that is what makes it an enriching experience for the reader.

Tan has published a number of picture books, including The Arrival, The Red Tree, Tales from Outer Suburbia, and the aforementioned The Lost Thing. He challenges the notion that picture books belong in the realm of children’s literature, observing that adults like to play and use their imagination and are moved by the visual, much like children. There is not a lot of difference, to his mind, between engaging with art in the form of a painting and engaging with art in the form of a picture book. Art can, in fact, return us to a child-like perspective when it moves us to consider things in a way we hadn’t before: we can approach an object in or feeling evoked by a piece with the same wonder we had as children.

The practice of drawing goes way back for Tan: growing up in Perth (he was born in 1974), he developed a reputation for his artistic talent even as a young child, when he wrote and illustrated poems and drew dinosaurs and robots. He added painting to his practice as a teen. Although he considered a career in the sciences, he ended up pursuing art and literature more assiduously, graduating with double honours in English literature and fine arts from the University of Western Australia in 1995. His early career included illustrating the work of writers such as Leann Frahm and Greg Egan for science fiction magazines.

Tan’s art has inspired theatre and film adaptations, and he has worked as a concept artist for Pixar. Tan has gathered awards in a number that at least matches, if not exceeds, his age, including the Oscar for his animation based on The Lost Thing. His picture books have been translated for distribution around the world.

Perhaps because he is a writer as well as a visual artist, Tan is uniquely generous in sharing with his fans, via his website, a lot of his personal insights into his own work and art in general. He also offers advice for illustrators just getting started and tips on breaking into publishing. In addition, Tan maintains archives describing various projects he’s participated in.

Shaun Tan at Beinart Gallery during his solo exhibition, Untold Tales in 2019.

Shaun Tan is represented by Beinart Gallery. We have hosted five solo exhibitions for Tan over the past few years. Lost & Found (2018) was Tan's first commercial solo exhibition of book related paintings, sketches and illustrations. Tan's second show, Untold Tales (2019), featured a diverse collection of narrative artworks from the past two decades. Tan's third show, Creature (2021) showcased drawings, painting and sculpture depicting beings both real and imagined, from local cats and birds to fairy tale personages and ‘lost things’. Tan's fourth show, On My Way to Paradise (2023) featured a varied collection of original artworks published in the recent retrospective Creature. Tan's fifth show, Ten Years of Summer (2024) was a comprehensive exhibition of original artwork and sketches from Shaun Tan’s much-loved and widely translated picture book Rules of Summer.

Please contact us if you would like to buy an original painting, drawing or sculpture by Shaun Tan or to be notified when we have new available art for sale.

View Shaun Tan's available original artworks below or browse his limited edition prints here. We also have a collection of Tan's small observational paintings.

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