Spring Bugs

In the spring of 2024, Chen Wen-Hsiang (Penny) and Yang Chieh-Lin held the "Spring Critters" exhibition at Treasure Hill's Jien Jau Cafe, showcasing a collection of pure collage works by their friends. The book Critters' Spring Expedition is an extension of this exhibition.

The "Spring Critters" exhibition used symbols collected during walks to create collages, transforming symbols from license plates, signs, and road markers into the eyes, bodies, and wings of animals, then presenting the collage results on flat paper. Inside Jien Jau Cafe, structures connected to the outside world were used as display mediums, allowing the little critters to quietly move between the cracks of pipes and floor tiles, blurring the boundaries between inside and out.

The book Critters' Spring Expedition shifts the scene from the exhibition space to a picture book. It depicts the Spring Critters, with caterpillars as the protagonists, embarking on an adventurous journey to find spring, a road trip story where they meet new friends along the way; it also brought the authors back together. We continued to use the characters created for the exhibition, redesigning their living environments. Following the previous method of creating critters, we used symbols to collage scenes on the computer. Then, the symbols used in the preliminary scene draft were disassembled and printed on paper. These were cut out along with special colored paper hand-drawn with crayons, giving each symbol a unique appearance. Finally, these symbols were collaged together according to the preliminary draft, creating the critters' whimsical world.