Jonas Engelmann on "Travel Sketches from China"
In the Shadow of the Great Wall

Reinhard Kleist travels from Berlin to China and brings mostly moods home to Germany
 
In his more extensive comic albums, Reinhard Kleist works with contrasts; in his black and white drawings without many grey shades, the story is at the centre. His biographies of Fidel Castro, musicians like Johnny Cash or Nick Cave, the boxers Hertzko Haft and Emile Griffith or the Somali sprinter Samia Yusuf Omar are sensitively told stories look closely at people, at details, and easily overlooked facets of their personalities.

From black and white to colour

Colours would distract readers too much, Kleist said in an interview for this article, from these people and their stories. Neighbourhoods and buildings, squares and landscapes, by contrast, can’t be represented well in black and white drawings. Reinhard Kleist’s travel book "Havanna. Eine kubanische Reise" thrives on the colours, as he explains in the conversation: The drawings in the travel book from Cuba were made every evening from memories of the day and were later coloured in the studio. Unlike this comic album, which thrives on the idea of ​​fading memories of a journey and the attempt to preserve these memories, Kleist’s colourful travel sketches from a variety of countries were always completed on site. Like good photographs, they are spontaneous conveyors of moods in an image.  

The eyes of a stranger

Vietnam, Algeria, Bali, Egypt, India, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka... the list of countries from which the Berlin illustrator Reinhard Kleist brought along his travel sketches is long. He was also in China on behalf of the Goethe-Institut for a workshop with local comic artists. In an interview with the Goethe-Institut there, he explains his view of the country, noting, “If I were to make something about the city, it would always be through the eyes of a stranger. I would always have that perspective. Even if you were to spend years here, you’ll always be the stranger looking at a culture and a city.”
 
This stranger’s perspective, as Kleist’s travel sketches show, isn’t a negative connotation; on the contrary, this point of view can also open up new perspectives on one’s own world. The travel destinations of the “tourist” Reinhard Kleist in China are definitely the tourist hotspots that every travel guide highlights: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Buddha Temple in Nanjing. Even if this was due more to the limited time available and less to an artistic decision, as Kleist explains in an interview, these external circumstances led to a focus that was also reflected aesthetically: The sights are sketched by Kleist as almost deserted places; the focus is on architecture and its interaction with nature. Hence, despite its monumentality, the Great Wall blends into the landscape and in the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum in Nanjing, nature and culture, plants and buildings create a harmonious overall picture.

The horizon dissolves

Above all, what he captures and brings home from the journey are atmospheres, Kleist explains in the interview, personal impressions that go beyond the mere depiction of sights: colours, smells, noises become tangible. And the marvelling gaze of the visitor from the west is also captured in the picture, for example when the Great Wall disappears on the horizon, its extent can hardly be squeezed into a drawing. This sketch also shows another aesthetic detail of the travel pictures from China: In the background of many of the drawings, sheets of paper with Chinese characters are pasted, which create contrasts due to the different paper texture: clear contours on the original pages, slightly blurred, similar to a watercolour, on the pasted papers. Own and foreign, the gaze of the tourist and the words in the language of the country come together to form a picture. And so, the foreign has an effect on one’s own lifeworld; it changes our focus and leaves the visitor behind, alone with his impressions. Reinhard Kleist doesn’t keep these impressions to himself, but shares them with the world.