I Am The Subway ~ Kim Hyo-eun

This beautiful book written and illustrated by South Korean author Kim Hyo-eun, is translated by Deborah Smith and was originally published in 2016 when it won the Best Illustrated Children's Book Awards in the New York Times Book Review and well deserved too. It charts a day in the life of the Seoul subway, the longest subway system in the world with 7.2 million daily users.

The illustrations are

watercolour paintings and are beautifully done. It is interesting how the artist has chosen to show people from various angles: we don't see much facial detail but are given just a suggestion of who they are and how they're feeling just by the colour that the artist uses to depict them. He also expresses so much about the characters through body language and how they position themselves on the train. Some are slumped over, tired after their busy day, others peek shyly through the opening carriage doors.

The author brings these characters to life by presenting us with colourful scenes of their lives outside the train - such as the shoemaker in his golden workshop, the grandmother swimming in the blue sea. Colour is also used to create vistas of the world outside the subway, such as the busy street where the student goes to school. This clever use of colour teaches us that all of these characters have their own interesting, wondrous lives that we can only imagine. We cannot help but be curious about them, but it is the subtle use of colour that brings these characters to life in our imaginations.

I especially like how the author gradually builds up the amount of colour in the book. It begins with very plain monotone hues becoming more colourful as the book progresses. The first image is painted with muted shades of green and blue, in a haze of grey, suggesting a cold dawn at the start of the day. The final image in the book is of the same scene but at sunset, utilising beautiful orange, yellow and light blue washed. This golden ending of the book is completely satisfying and reassuring.

However, most of the text is concerned not with the landscape outside the train, are the characters who inhabit it. As the book progresses the characters are painted in a more colourful way to depict their colourful lives outside of the train. Just as the train picks up speed, and the story develops, so the illustrations become more vibrant, more deeply saturated. The colours from the outside world have seeped inside the train until at the very end we're given a beautiful full-coloured, detailed painting of the characters inside the train.

Their faces are no longer abstract - each has different features which mirror their individual stories. They are no longer a mass of featureless strangers. They have become humanised and we can see that each character is fully alive and each carries their own colourful stories. I have never seen colour used this way in a text. How clever! Kim Hyo-eun's book is simply wonderful and I highly recommend it for those who love illustration, trains, people-watching or all things Korean.

By Michelle Burrowes 2023