On My Way to Paradise

A pair of rabbit ears rises above a lone walker heading down an empty stretch of freeway. Everything else in the picture is concrete: overpasses stacked on overpasses, pillars as thick as tree trunks, a road surface that runs off toward a hazy line of distant hills. The figure is tiny against all of it, carrying a pack, walking where no pedestrian is meant to walk. Whether those ears belong to a costume, a mask, or something stranger is left entirely open, and that small unexplained detail is what turns an ordinary piece of infrastructure into a scene with a story attached.

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist and author, best known for wordless picture books like The Arrival and for The Lost Thing, which he helped turn into an Oscar-winning short film. His paintings tend to work the same way as his books, mixing carefully observed suburban and industrial settings with one element that does not belong. The style sits somewhere in magic realism: the light on the concrete, the pale sky, and the faded stains on the barrier walls are all painted straight, so the odd creature reads as a fact rather than a fantasy. The title adds a wry note, since Paradise is a real place name in parts of Australia and the United States, and getting there on foot along a motorway seems like an unusually long walk.