Utopia

A red giant lumbers along the top of a concrete wall, and the child riding its shoulder has one arm flung up in a wave. Across the dusty field, the wave is being returned: a boy in a green jumper pauses his game of badminton, while his opponent, a pale lizard creature standing on two legs, keeps swinging. Nobody in this picture finds any of it strange. That casual acceptance is the joke and the heart of the piece, and it is very much how Shaun Tan works. The Australian artist and author grew up in the outer suburbs of Perth, and his drawings are full of those flat paddocks, blank walls, tin sheds and distant smokestacks, with impossible creatures wandering through as if they had always lived there.

Tan usually works in oil paint, pencil and pastel, and the chalky texture here does a lot of the labour. The grass is scribbled in long dry strokes, the sky is smudged into a brownish haze, and the long shadows suggest late afternoon, the hour when kids are told to come inside. He is best known for the wordless graphic novel The Arrival and for The Lost Thing, whose animated version won an Academy Award in 2011, and this red creature has the same bulky, patched together look as that story's misplaced beast.

The title is worth a thought. Calling a scruffy vacant lot with a smoking industrial horizon "Utopia" could be a dig, but it reads more like affection. If paradise is a game of badminton with a lizard while a machine the size of a house strolls past, the standards are refreshingly low, and easy enough to meet.