A BFA Final Year Project that combines illustration and graphic design to investigate the potential of books as objects of fiction.
The fictional narrative aims to re-invent the book’s role and status in print-based fiction by exploring alternative formats of visual storytelling. Presenting as a commemorative family cookbook, it chronicles the life and work of Jean Tran, a restaurateur and the patriarch of a French-based Vietnamese family. The story is told through the lens of his family members and the various members of Studio Archival: the fictional Singapore-based graphic design studio commissioned to produce and design the book for Restaurant du L’œuf Op La’s 70th anniversary.
Jean has placed a ban on the phototaking of critical subject matter—people, animals, and food. Nothing is ever as it seems as the studio finds workarounds for the visual and graphic restrictions placed on the production and presentation of images in the cookbook. The resulting visual language is a dialogue between doctored photographs and hand-drawn illustrations of what should have been a straightforward documentary process. The reader navigates through these images and the accompanying transcribed interviews with the Tran family to only encounter further complications resulting from mistranslations, missed cultural contexts, and purposeful logical inconsistencies. This narrative, which closely parallels reality, constantly borrows, subverts, and recontextualises familiar visual language and paradigms to blur the lines between fiction and reality: questioning how things are, how they came to be, and how they should be in order to solve the final puzzle—why does Jean Tran hate eggs?
The fictional narrative aims to re-invent the book’s role and status in print-based fiction by exploring alternative formats of visual storytelling. Presenting as a commemorative family cookbook, it chronicles the life and work of Jean Tran, a restaurateur and the patriarch of a French-based Vietnamese family. The story is told through the lens of his family members and the various members of Studio Archival: the fictional Singapore-based graphic design studio commissioned to produce and design the book for Restaurant du L’œuf Op La’s 70th anniversary.
Jean has placed a ban on the phototaking of critical subject matter—people, animals, and food. Nothing is ever as it seems as the studio finds workarounds for the visual and graphic restrictions placed on the production and presentation of images in the cookbook. The resulting visual language is a dialogue between doctored photographs and hand-drawn illustrations of what should have been a straightforward documentary process. The reader navigates through these images and the accompanying transcribed interviews with the Tran family to only encounter further complications resulting from mistranslations, missed cultural contexts, and purposeful logical inconsistencies. This narrative, which closely parallels reality, constantly borrows, subverts, and recontextualises familiar visual language and paradigms to blur the lines between fiction and reality: questioning how things are, how they came to be, and how they should be in order to solve the final puzzle—why does Jean Tran hate eggs?
Specifications
︎205mm (W) × 270mm (H)
︎376pp
Text, illustration & design
︎Kim Nguyen
Edited by
︎Benjamin Alexander Slater
Translation
︎Stephanie Jeane
Read in full ︎
︎205mm (W) × 270mm (H)
︎376pp
Text, illustration & design
︎Kim Nguyen
Edited by
︎Benjamin Alexander Slater
Translation
︎Stephanie Jeane
Read in full ︎





















































