Submerge yourself in the hazy vignettes of Xueting Yang’s comic collection, Teeth

Xueting Yang’s recent collection of short comics, titled Teeth, are full of poetry. Throughout, the comic artist and children’s book creator depicts fragments of everyday life with minimalist surrealism (or low fantasy): a man bowing to a giant frog, strange dances, people submerged in tree leaves. Stories of contemplation reveal emotion without the clutter of speech boxes polluting the page. Instead, Xueting’s illustrations shine on pages that often use limited colours and single characters to voice the hidden treasures of mundanity.

Drawn without preliminary sketches in pencil onto A4 printer paper, Xueting relies on her intuition and draws in one go, which helps produce images that are the “most faithful to the atmosphere of the story” as it exists in her mind. Xueting uses water as a recurring setting in Teeth, a narrative object that is boundless and moves between all containers like time itself; like water, Xueting’s flow state approach to illustrating invites spontaneity. “I place great importance on these spontaneously emerging images and allow them to guide the development of the story,” says Xueting. “In my work, images and words are generated in dialogue with each other, gradually intertwining as the story takes shape.”

It’s all in the small details, like light lining the edge of a ceiling fan, empty bathrooms or tan lines, hairline fractures in the facade. “I can listen to a friend talk about their everyday trivialities for a very long time,” says Xueting. “The emotions hidden in the gaps of the psyche – people’s private desires, fears, who they once were and who they are becoming – all of this feels endlessly intriguing to me.” Inspired by Japanese manga artist Mizumaru Anzai, who the illustrator describes as using “poetry as an anchor for storytelling”, Xueting’s work is rooted in the expression found in Chinese and Japanese cultural traditions. Mahayana Buddhist traditions prioritise painterly, contemplative expressions that capture the emptiness of the world, meanwhile, in Japan, Noh theatre and the art of the haiku are truly minimalist.

It helps that Xueting doesn’t actually read a lot of comics, instead drawing from novels for guidance, which helps her work feel so unique in the way that it visualises the unsaid. However, Teeth does share something in common with the comic works of Harvey Pekar and Daniel Clowes – they’re rooted in domestic spaces, filled with everyday objects and carefully drawn. But hidden within are unusual images, all lurking beneath the surface. What Xueting does particularly well is distortion, as if the reader is looking through the window of other people’s lives. “I use hazy, softened tones that make the characters appear as if they are submerged in water – visible, yet not fully clear,” says Xueting. “This sense of partial obscurity closely resembles the nature of memory, where observation and distance coexist.”