THE INVISIBLE ISLAND
Written & Illustrated by Shao Ni
Unpublished
2023
'Do you believe in unicorns?'
Returning to the home she hasn’t seen since immigrating to Japan as a child,
S discovers a mysterious 1960s diary by a Japanese botanist hidden among her Taiwanese grandmother’s belongings.
The Invisible Island is an autoethnographic visual narrative made at a moment when writing and drawing were the only remaining ways to orient myself in relation to memory, history, and absence.
Structured around two first-person diary voices that do not fully align in time or intention, the book brings together personal memory, inherited history, and archival fragments without resolving their contradictions. Pencil drawings, layered digital textures, and photographic fragments create an intimate, dreamlike space in which the act of recording becomes a means of survival rather than expression.
