HUIQIN WANG: SLOVENIAN-CHINESE ILLUSTRATOR AND AUTHOR OF A MULTICULTURAL AND MULTILINGUAL PICTUREBOOKS TETRALOGY

Abstract

This study presents a hermeneutic analysis of four major picturebooks by Slovenian-Chinese artist-scholar Huiqin Wang. It positions her authorial trilogy (Ferdinand Avguštin Hallerstein, Giuseppe Castiglione, and I, Marco Polo) as a cohesive model of "individualised universality" for narrating historical East-West encounters, while examining the collaborative Little Alma on a Great Journey as a distinct expansion into psychological interiority. Drawing on frameworks from picturebook theory (Nikolajeva & Scott, 2006), chronotopic analysis (Bakhtin, 1981), and cultural memory studies (Juvan, 2008), this study argues that Wang's multilingual, multigenre works constitute sophisticated artistic research functioning as polysemic instruments of cultural translation. Her work "worlds" Slovenian historical figures within the global imagination by mapping the spatial, temporal, and emotional coordinates of cross-cultural subjects. Wang's tetralogy represents a significant contribution to visual narratology and Slovenia's literary heritage