ABSTRACT
Both in the East and the West, the picture book market is dominated by story picture books, while science picture books are relatively marginalized, and widely acknowledged masterpieces are rare. Science picture books take scientific knowledge as their subject matter, and differ from illustrated handbooks of scientific knowledge in their imaginative and often complex interaction of verbal information and illustrations that aspire to be both artistic and scientifically accurate. Drawing on books from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, China’s biennial Feng Zikai Picture Book Award, first presented in 2009, has recognized the importance of science picture books. In 2009, Qiu Chengzong’s Above and Beneath the Pond (2008) was nominated for the Excellent Book Award in the first Feng Zikai Illustrated Book Award. In 2013, Liu Bole’s I Saw a Bird (2011) won the first prize in the third Feng Zikai Picture Book Award. These two ingenious award-winning picture books display the high quality that science picture books can attain, and provoke the question of what is the full potential of this specific picture book type and its disciplinary orientation? Are science picture books confined to the artistic representation of scientific knowledge? How extensive is the aesthetic space that science picture books, as art books in the full sense, can open, and how rich is the domain of meaning it can generate? This essay carries out case studies by probing into typical science picture books in China and in the United States. Distinctive science picture books in other countries are also included for supplementary comparison.
