The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

Sonny Liew constructs the life and work of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a fictional comics artist whose changing styles track Singapore’s political and social transformation. The book moves among biography, reproduced-looking comic pages and historical commentary.

Its invented archive asks who gets remembered as an artist and how national stories are assembled. The shifts in style carry arguments that plain exposition could not make alone.

Historical fiction and political satire operate through a mock-biographical frame. Readers must attend to the line between documented history and imagined testimony.

Liew imitates and recombines several eras of comics design, making the work seem like a career-long archive. Each visual mode changes the distance between reader and history.