We talk a lot about the tactile possibilities of self-publishing here at Broken Frontier but Xiaoyi Hu’s comic Fire Flowers adds extra emphasis on that quality (as can be seen from the Braille imprint on the cover below). Indeed, it’s a piece of work that encourages us to think all the more carefully about our extended senses and the aesthetic wonder of the world around us beyond our visual perception.
The premise of Fire Flowers takes inspiration from a research-base interview with a friend of Hu’s who lost her sight after a childhood illness. It’s a risographed comic with a fictional narrative that follows Iris, a young blind woman, as she takes a walk around her local neighbourhood, and focusses on how she interacts with her surroundings.
What Hu aims to do here is, perhaps ironically, to use a visual medium specifically to bring us into the worldview of an unsighted person. As Iris travels through the streets close to her home we see the actuality juxtaposed with her understanding of it.
Footsteps become a cacophonous jumbled array of footwear, a woman playing her violin in her front room takes Iris to a magical imaginary dancefloor, and the potent smell of blossom evokes a fairy-filled fantasy land. Hu uses this journey of parallel perceptions to powerful effect, with Iris’s inner vision of the world around her becoming overlaid on the reality of it.
There’s some beautiful imagery as a result of this hybrid portrayal of perceptions, particularly in sequences towards the end of the comic and the revelation of what the titular fire flowers actually represent. Xiaoyi Hu is one of our 2023 Broken Frontier ‘Six Creators to Watch’ and the intelligent and empathetic use of the language of comics in Fire Flowers was precisely why I chose her for this year’s line-up. This is work that communicates its message on an entirely visual level and is all the more impressive for that.
Xiaoyi Hu (W/A) • Self-published, £28.00
Review by Andy Oliver
