Let's leave it at that for now.

For the Time Being

9 Subtle Yet Profound Everyday Moments in Modern Taipei: Their Urban Whispers
Natural brushstrokes capture fleeting moments of life
Blue-grey ink refines you and me bustling through the city
Lingering here for our own reasons
Everyone is a passerby, and everyone is a protagonist
🏆 Awards
🔹 2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition Grand Award, Non-Fiction Category, First Prize
🔹 11th Golden Comic Awards, Comic of the Year
🔹 Nominated for the Angoulême International Comics Festival New Talent Award in 2015 and 2019
📖 Exquisite exposed spine binding / Special author's message included / Cross-page poster included with the book
When I first conceived this comic collection, I envisioned it for women aged 20 to 35. Most of them, like me, are unmarried, and I can better empathize with what women at this age might be thinking from my own perspective.
—— Chen Pei-Hsiu
🔵 Editor's Recommendation
◎A rising new female Taiwanese comic artist, standing out with a rare drawing and narrative style.
Chen Pei-Hsiu is a creator who delves into realistic themes. In interviews, she states that she dislikes falsity and fears boredom. She believes that ordinary life is composed of many human relationships, and she feels like she's solving a puzzle, then dissecting and analyzing it.
"This is How It Is For Now" is precisely a blend of her daily observations and experiences. She draws inspiration from her and her friends' real-life experiences, incorporating urban cultural elements into her work. In a semi-autobiographical style, she records moments of life from alleyways and streets, stepping into a half-awake Taipei at a leisurely pace: commuters from other cities trying to survive in the metropolis, single women enjoying slow cooking on weekends, groups of friends complaining about their partners' sloppiness and the loneliness of striving in a foreign land…
This book breaks away from mainstream comic styles. The restrained narrative and unpretentious, casual compositions perfectly complement each other. Through familiar streetscapes and laid-back dialogues, it subtly yet profoundly sketches a Taipei women's story with unique spirit and charm.
◎9 urban stories of ebb and flow, 9 unanchored facets of life. From the mundane and trivial urban whispers, one can sense the sentiment of cherishing the present.
Each story in the book is light, ordinary, yet solid and timeless. It doesn't present life's great ups and downs or unexpected turns, but rather gently finds the greatest common denominator of life for ordinary people. In the daily grind, one "for now" follows another "for now," gradually forming a continuous sequence of actions. Life is generally filled with these fragmented moments, brief yet precious; life flows amidst movement, stillness, cold, and warmth, tranquil and timeless. Please savor this work as if holding a magnifying glass.
◎Cool blue-grey tones, clean and precise lines, relaxed daily dialogues… Beneath the calm and austere visuals lies the poetry hidden in real life.
Chen Pei-Hsiu uses pencils, colored pencils, and watercolors, applying casual, concise lines. Low-saturation, low-luminosity watercolor Payne's Gray and indigo are layered to create dark, subdued tones. The occasional touch of tulip and crimson breaks through the cool tranquility of the light, cool scenes, ultimately completing a depiction of the city that is cool yet warm.
The fast and slow pace of life is condensed into each panel, and plain, authentic colors distill lively, relatable characters. As you slowly turn the pages of this book, feeling the delicate emotions lingering in alleyways and street corners, you will also see those moments of life exposed to the air, bathed in sunlight, yet untainted.
◎Exquisite exposed spine binding that lays flat 180 degrees, a special message from the author to mainland readers, and a beautiful cross-page poster included with the book.
This book is built from various small city stories, so the overall binding concept is set as "treating the book as a city."
- The outer cover features a wide-angle photograph, with the title hot-stamped in black.
- On the inner cover, resembling a concrete wall, the small characters from the book are presented using screen printing.
- The endpapers, printed with gradient ink, are like the stories in the book – deep and gentle.
- The binding method uses exposed spine thread stitching, allowing the book to lay completely flat for unimpeded reading and appreciation of all details.
⚫️ Synopsis
Commuters going to work, single women enjoying cooking alone, two best friends making wishes together, cat feeders meeting on the street at night… This is a work depicting urban life, with the author recording daily moments on the streets of Taipei in a semi-autobiographical style. The seemingly ordinary, laid-back dialogues in the book subtly convey the detachment and comfort unique to urban life, as well as the distinctive tone and demeanor of urban women.
🟡 Recommendation
This masterpiece of a graphic novel delicately captures the shared sensibility of daily life in Taiwan. The narrative rhythm, both warm and cool, precise paneling, and a highly individualistic art style make the story present a richness that "even if written as a novel or filmed, it would be difficult to present as perfectly as this book." If everyone in the city is a passerby, but also a protagonist at some moment, then "This is How It Is For Now" is a gentle and clever footnote!
—— 2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition Grand Award Jury
I had a very good reading experience with "This is How It Is For Now," which is full of subtle nuances, like sipping a cup of tea, with a cat on your lap, of course.
—— BDGest Review Website
The first time I saw her work, I knew she was drawing what she knew, and that's important. Not what she imagined. I knew I could trust her.
—— Thomas Gabison, editor at Actes Sud and for the French edition of "This is How It Is For Now" (Somnolence)
In these brief, somewhat difficult moments of life, every panel holds details worth magnifying. The reading process was very enjoyable; to use a metaphor from the book's content, it was like a perfectly pickled, transparent radish extracted from a vast slice of time.
—— Original Foreword

2022-05-01

中国友谊出版公司

the new wave

144

9787505754256