Jimmy Liao: The Yilan Illustrator Who Brought Picture Books to the International Stage After Leukemia

30-second overview: Jimmy Liao, born Liao Fu-pin, was born in Yilan on November 15, 1958, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Chinese Culture University, and worked at an advertising agency for twelve years.¹ In 1995, he was diagnosed with leukemia; after recovering, he turned to picture-book creation full time. In 1998, his first two picture books, Secrets in the Woods and A Fish That Smiled at Me, were published in the same year, with Secrets in the Woods being his first book.² His representative work Turn Left, Turn Right (2001) was adapted into a film co-directed by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai (2003).³ Jimmy Square in Yilan officially opened in late June 2013, using three picture books, The Starry Starry Night, Sound of Colors, and Turn Left, Turn Right, as its textual basis.⁴ From March 28 to April 19, 2026, Hong Kong’s Harbour City Gallery held the 25th-anniversary special exhibition Glimmers Met by Chance.⁵

1958, Yilan

On November 15, 1958, Jimmy Liao was born in Yilan.¹ He loved drawing from childhood, studied in the Department of Fine Arts at Chinese Culture University, and received formal training in art. After graduating, he joined an advertising agency as an art designer, working in commercial design for twelve years and accumulating extensive experience in visual design.¹

Those twelve years of training in advertising became the hidden foundation of Liao’s later picture-book work. Advertising professionals must communicate a clear message in very little time, using the fewest possible visual elements. This training gave Liao’s picture-book compositions their steady rhythm of “one emotion per page,” without redundant visual narration. His picture books may appear “simple and warm,” but behind them lies the precision of commercial visual-design training.

1995: Leukemia

In 1995, at age 37, Liao was diagnosed with leukemia.¹ Confronting a life-and-death threshold, he decided during a long course of treatment to set aside advertising work and devote himself entirely to the painting and creative work he truly loved.

Recovery from leukemia had two inseparable effects on his art. First was a complete restructuring of his sense of time: he moved from the advertising worker’s week-by-week time structure to the picture-book creator’s year-by-year time structure. Second was a shift in emotional subject matter: his picture books repeatedly address loneliness, waiting, missed encounters, and hope. The density of these themes is a density that can be written only by someone who has been near the edge of death.

1998: His First Two Picture Books Published in the Same Year

In 1998, Liao published his first two personal picture-book works in Taiwan, Secrets in the Woods and A Fish That Smiled at Me; Secrets in the Woods was his first picture book.² Both works received the China Times Open Book Best Children’s Book Award, the Min Sheng Bao “Good Books Everyone Reads” Annual Best Children’s Book Award, and the United Daily News Readers’ Best Children’s Book Award. For a debut work to win Taiwan’s three major book-review awards was an extremely rare achievement for a new author.²

These works immediately drew a response in Taiwan’s book market. Readers discovered that they could touch the inner life of adults: formally they were picture books, but substantively they were written for grown-ups. The category of “picture books for adults” was new in Taiwan’s publishing market at the time. It was neither children’s literature, nor pure literature, nor comics. Liao’s work opened up this in-between space.

Turn Left, Turn Right and Film Adaptation

Published in 2001, Turn Left, Turn Right is one of Jimmy Liao’s best-known representative works. This story about two people who love each other yet always miss one another was later adapted into a film.

The film was co-directed by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai, starred Takeshi Kaneshiro and Gigi Leung, and was released in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere in 2003.³ It was not directed only by Johnnie To: Wai Ka-fai was the co-director. The two had long collaborated in Hong Kong cinema, and Wai was also the film’s producer and screenwriter.

Other film adaptations include Sound of Colors (2003, directed by Joe Ma and starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Miriam Yeung) and Starry Starry Night (2011, directed by Tom Lin). Adaptations have also extended into musicals, animation, television dramas, and other fields, making Liao the Taiwan picture-book author with one of the broadest ranges of cross-media adaptation.

2013: Jimmy Square in Yilan

Jimmy Liao has deep affection for his hometown, Yilan. In spring 2013, the architectural team Fieldoffice Architects invited him to collaborate on creating a public-art space. “Jimmy Square in Yilan” officially opened in late June 2013, about 200 meters south of Yilan Railway Station.⁴

The square uses three picture books, The Starry Starry Night, Sound of Colors, and Turn Left, Turn Right, as its textual basis, proposing the concepts of “travel” and “fragmentary landscapes of life.”⁴ During the 2014 “Happy Yilan Year” event, a flying train entered Diudiudang Forest and a giraffe climbed onto the rooftop balcony of Yilan Railway Station, linking Jimmy Square, Diudiudang Forest, and the station into an extended picture-book universe.

Jimmy Square is Taiwan’s first large-scale public-art space themed around a single picture-book author, and it is also one of the most recognizable landmarks on Yilan’s tourism map. Its significance goes beyond tourism: a county railway station that once had only a weak connection to arts and culture was redefined as a “cultural space” through the work of a picture-book author. This is a successful case of public art intervening in urban memory in Taiwan.

25 Years of Continuous Creation

From his first picture book in 1998 to the present, Liao has continued to publish new works at an average pace of one to two books per year. His representative works also include Sound of Colors (2001), When the Moon Forgot (1999), A Garden in My Heart (1999), and The Starry Starry Night (2009).

Unlike many writers whose creative energy declines after a single representative work, Liao has maintained a steady creative frequency and breadth of subject matter over 25 years. This endurance is the fundamental reason he has been able to keep producing without being confined by a single style.

2026: 25th-Anniversary Special Exhibition Glimmers Met by Chance

The special project exhibition Glimmers Met by Chance, officially authorized by the Jimmy brand and co-organized with The Little Room of May, was held at Harbour City Gallery in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, from March 28 to April 19, 2026.⁵ Centered on “states of life” as its core proposition, the exhibition was divided into three major sections: “Life Is Always Unexpected,” “When One Person Holds On,” and “Landscapes in Accidental Glimmers,” unfolding layer by layer through two-dimensional artworks, light and shadow, and three-dimensional sculpture.

Choosing Hong Kong as the site of the 25th-anniversary special exhibition echoes the historical context in which the film Turn Left, Turn Right was directed by a Hong Kong team, Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai. Liao’s work has a cross-generational readership in Hong Kong, and this exhibition responds to that cross-sea connection.

Common label → more precise reading: Jimmy Liao is often positioned as a “warm, healing-style picture-book author.” A more precise reading, however, is that his works deal with unwarm subjects such as loneliness, waiting, and missed encounters. He simply uses visual language to package these subjects into forms that can be borne. The label “healing-style” obscures the real weight at the core of his work. He does not avoid pain in picture books; he makes pain readable through picture books.

🎙️ Curator’s note: The 1995 leukemia diagnosis was the true starting point of Jimmy Liao’s career. It was not a continuation of twelve years in advertising, but a thorough resetting of direction. Without that illness, he might still have been an art designer in the advertising world, with picture books remaining only a hobby.

In 1998, publishing two picture books in the same year and winning three major book-review awards at once was extremely rare in the history of publishing in Taiwan. This was not the typical path of “a newcomer gradually becoming known by the market,” but an explosive entrance in which “the market recognized him in a second.”

The success of Jimmy Square in Yilan turned “single author × public space × urban memory” into a reproducible cultural model. This model was later tried repeatedly in cultural promotion across other Taiwanese counties and cities, but Jimmy Square in Yilan remains the most successful and enduring case of this type.

Jimmy Liao’s picture-book readers span Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Chinese-language communities in Southeast Asia. He is one of the Chinese-language picture-book authors with the largest international readerships. His works have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and many other languages, giving the identity of “a picture-book author from Yilan” a recognizable place in the global visual-arts world.

From the leukemia diagnosis in 1995, to the same-year publication of two debut works in 1998, to Turn Left, Turn Right in 2001, Jimmy Square in Yilan in 2013, and the 2026 Harbour City 25th-anniversary special exhibition in Hong Kong, Jimmy Liao’s creative trajectory is a line that begins with a personal life crisis and extends outward into the city and the international sphere. He is not a picture-book author who exists only on the page. His works have grown legs: they have walked into city squares, cinemas, and transnational exhibition spaces. The scope of this extension is the most concrete result of his 25 years of creative energy.

Further reading: Jimmy Liao — Wikipedia ｜ Jimmy Liao official website ｜ Locus Publishing: Jimmy Liao’s works

References