Explore The Self - Identity In Li Ou Leoni 's Picture Books

Leo Lionni is a top writer and illustrator in modern children’s book industry.Though he gets off the ground late, Leo Lionni has initiated a new era of picture books. Success lies in that his creation has never been affected by the traditional children’s books. In his personal style, Leo Lionni interprets his attitude towards life with simple and funny stories, which are full of wisdom and philosophy. He is also good at collage, whose composition is simple and rich of images. Aiming at adult aesthetic taste, and creatively maintaining the creative angle of children’s view, the works won the affection of both adults and children. The theme of his story is often associated with self exploration. As for content, readers can have a different interpretation in the process of reading as they grow older and wiser, especially for children, because the truth of life will always remain deep in their mind, becoming their unique understanding perspective towards the world."Self Identity", as a human psychological and behavior process, reflect certain mental attitude of human. The way to break people take in identity crisis shows the rich spiritual space of human beings.In artistic creation, Lionni attaches great importance to human spirit. You can deeply feel his art characteristics towards the spiritual world no matter in the expression of painting styles or the selecting of literary themes. This paper attempts to make "Self Identity" in Lionni’s picture books as a starting point. Combined with specific text analysis,the author deeply explores and explains the identity construction process of the protagonists in Lionni’s picture books, explaining identity loss and reconstruction of the protagonist from the perspective of other intervention.The full text is divided into five parts.The first part is a brief introduction of the author and the work as well as the reason why the author chose "Self Identity" as her literary theme. Most of Lionni’s works have been published in China in recent two years, so relevant review articles were both limited and rare, which means this part will put more emphasis on the author and work introduction.The second part defines identity, self identity and other basic conception as well as the mutual relation among Lionni, picture books and self-identity. The paper points out that the self identity mentioned in Lionni’s picture books refers to the self-identity of characters, which is the question, distinguishment and confirmation of self identification for characters in the picture books, rather than the self identity of Lionni himself. In the third part, by study of visual art expressionin Lionni’s works, the author analyzed how to express the inner world through visual communication with the help of character shape, color, technique of expression,background and other elements. The fourth part is combined with specific text analysis, the author conducted research to the literary theme of self-identity in Lionni’s works and explored the way how to realize self identification of the roles in the works. In interaction with others, the individual constructed perfect ideal self with constant self reflection and others’ assessment as their reference. The fifth part discusses the inspiration given to us by Lionni’s artistic creation.