A little boy visits a famous European art gallery with his mother. He loves walking around on his own, but it isn’t always the artwork that catches his attention. Joanne Liu’s depiction of a trip to a prestigious art gallery provides a warm and good-humoured way to inspire upper-primary children to think about their experiences of art. The illustrations are cleverly pitched from the perspective of the small boy, with an emphasis placed upon art as “found objects” rather than the masterpieces that hang on the walls of the gallery. The tattoos of a visitor and the tangle of plants in a pot are treated as comparable to the canonical works in the background of each illustration. This equivalence between high and low art asks the reader to reconsider what art is and why we keep it in galleries in the first place.
