Sketches of China 01: Arrival, Shanghai

Illustration. Mark Doyle

We are extremely pleased to welcome to Elsewhere a series of illustrations and texts that are the result of a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle:

Stepping out of the airport as night falls, boarding the Golden Dragon as the clouds give way to rain, struck at once by the immensity of life on an unimaginable scale, the bus gathering pace as the mythical beast speeds across the tarmac, entering a world of towering high-rises, their windows unlit, all but a few, the empty shapes of the buildings silhouetted instantaneously by forks of lightning, cleaving the sky asunder as the rain grows heavier, falling in sheets, monotonous, unrelenting, its drops bursting like grapes on the elevated expressway stretching on into the night, keenly aware of a sense of detachment, of separating from home, cast adrift in a landscape of frenetic development, a feeling of unstoppable momentum, the bus unable, despite the distance covered, to break free from a metropolis as dystopian as it is endless, from an aberrance from nature on a monstrous scale, yet savouring all the while the promise of discovery, of adventure, immersed in the moment, looking neither forward nor back.

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James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on instagram @markdoyleartist.