All posts tagged High Street Kensington

WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade @ Japan House

WOW is a visual arts studio based in Tokyo and Sendai, Japan. Their aim is ‘to reach beyond the boundaries of motion graphics, presenting installations which raise questions of how we interpret and express the modern world.’

WOW has been involved in a wide field of design work, including advertising and commercial works for brands including Sony, Suntory, Aston Martin, Dior, Chandon, Pokémon, Issey Miyake and Shiseido.

Until the end of March, Japan House in High Street Kensington is home to two installations by WOW studios, amounting to the company’s first UK solo exhibition.

Both installations are in the downstairs gallery space (although there is a display of the carved wooden dolls filling Japan House’s shop windows) and both are completely FREE. The one large gallery space has been partitioned in two.

POPPO – part of the WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition at Japan House London. Credit: Image by WOW

Room 1 – Tokyo Light Odyssey

You walk through curtains into a pitch-black space with curved walls shaped like a teardrop – you’ve walked into the pointed end and the walls curve away from you and then form a half circle at the far end, about ten yards way.

Onto the walls on both sides of you and facing you, in one seamless image, is projected a fantastic, five-and-a-half-minute long, 360-degree journey through Japan’s capital city by night. Remember the space travel ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey, or any footage you’ve seen of cars driving at speed through cityscapes? It’s like that, only better, and totally immersive. A lot of artists talk about immersive but this is a genuinely sensaround film experience.

Still from the Tokyo Light Odyssey installation at the WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition at Japan House London. Credit: Image by WOW

The ‘camera’ moves seamlessly through the neon lights of a subway station, which morph into the lights of convenience stores, then down into a tube train of the Yamanote Line, moving forwards over the head of the strap-hangars then the camera’s point of view swivels through 180 degrees so it’s travelling back the way it came then bursts free of the train to fly through the night sky between skyscrapers which change shape as in a kaleidoscope before shooting through the window of a hotel, across a room, through a door and then through a sequence of corridors of numerous ‘capsule’ hotels, pausing for a view of the iconic Tokyo Tower which changes and distorts before your eyes and then shooting forward to confront a vision of the world as one watery orb on which a series of illuminated ocean liners are railing, before flying past their lit portholes.

Wow, indeed. The five minutes pass in a flash. I loved it so much I watched it three times, the third time actively walking round the room-sized space, experimenting on my own perception as I walked either towards or backwards away from the fast-moving imagery, adding a further level of dizziness to the vertiginous visual journey. It’s brilliant.

Room 2 – POPPO

The second room is a more conventional display, with a range of objects and few interactive activities. It introduces us to the wooden folk craft of Tohoku – a region in the north east of Japan damaged by the large scale 2011 earthquake and tsunami. There are three main parts to POPPO.

This digital display includes three different installations focusing on kokeshi – wooden dolls – and poppo – the popular word for small carved wooden toys.

Poppo woods

In the POPPO Woods section there is a wall where people (mainly children) can place magnetic ‘tree segments’ against the wall, and after they’ve built their tree stump, digital birds will come and land on them.

A child places a magnetic mat against the Poppo Woods projected graphic in order to build a tree which an animated bird will then come and land on, at WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition at Japan House London. Credit: Image by WOW

The birds are native to Tohoku and there’s a display of half a dozen sweet, non-digital, carved birds, explaining that each one has a symbolic meaning, for example the hawk is an image of business success and prosperity, the owl is an image of happiness and good fortune, the wagtail a sign of fertility (!)

Bird poppo, small, hand-carved wooden toys made in the Tōhoku region of Japan, at WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition at Japan House London. Photo by the author

Rokuro

In the second part, Rokuro, visitors are presented with a couple of digital screens. The screen prompts you to activate it and then a computer animation of a circular piece of wood appears spinning at high speed on a lathe. By touching the screen, you decide where the lathe-cutting instrument interacts with the spinning wood pole, carving rings into it – these can be deep or shallow, wide or narrow, just one or many. And so you carve your own digital kokeshi, or wooden doll.

After thirty seconds the process is complete and the program automatically colours in the curved shape you’ve made and then it appears on the wall-sized computer-generated screen behind the little screens, a wall-sized projected gallery of all the carvings visitors have made to the exhibition so far.

A child uses an interactive screen to ‘carve’ a kokeshi doll, which will then be coloured and appear on the shelves full of similar dolls projected on the wall. Part of WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition at Japan House London. Credit: Image by WOW

Yadoru

In the final part, Yadoru, there are 130 unpainted kokeshi dolls which have the faces of 130 Tohoku residents (pulling a variety of faces) projected on to them. The body of the dolls are imbued with ‘auspicious meaning’ and have been decorated using designs from a veteran Japanese kokeshi maker based in Zao Onsen.

Some of the 130 kokeshi dolls with real faces projected onto them at the WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition at Japan House London

To one side of this display is a screen and chair. You sit and line up your face with the cam above the screen, as in a passport photo machine, get is just so and click the button. The computer saves the image of your face and any silly expression you were making, then projects it onto the blank face of one of the half dozen dolls in a special display away from the main collection…. So that you have projected your own face onto the kokeshi to create their own unique doll.

Project your own face onto a kokeshi doll in the WOW: City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition at Japan House London

It’s not an academic exhibition. It’s a small, fun, interactive display and, as the photos with kids suggest, it is probably one for people with kids below the age of about 11. But if you’re an adult with an interest in Japanese crafts, or know enough to be interested in kokeshi dolls, then it’s for you, too.

Related links

Other exhibitions at Japan House

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 12, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 12, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/wow-city-lights-japan-house/

Anno’s Journey: The World of Anno Mitsumasa @ Japan House

Anno Mitsumasa

Anno Mitsumasa was born in 1926, meaning he turned 93 this year. For over fifty years he has been drawing and painting book illustrations, for hundreds of books, many of them for children, with the result that generations of Japanese have grown up familiar with his images from an early age, which is the reason he has become ‘one of Japan’s most beloved and prolific artists’.

The Japan House in High Street Kensington is a pleasure to visit at any time, to enjoy the minimalist layout and carefully chosen artifacts in the ground floor boutique. It’s currently hosting a small but beautifully curated exhibition of works by Anno Mitsumasa, the first ever display of Anno’s work in the UK.

The exhibition includes 87 artworks by Anno in a variety of media from watercolours and Japanese-style paintings (Nihonga), to powder pigment (ganryō) on silk, and black papercuts. Althoughhe’s illustrated hundreds, and himself written scores, of books, for the purpose of the exhibition the works have been gathered into six or seven categories.

Learning letters

The show includes examples from the early learning alphabet books Anno created, in which he illustrated the Japanese hiragana syllabary, books such as Anna’s Alphabet (1974) and The A-E-I-O-U Book (1976).

J from Anno’s Alphabet, An Adventure in Imagination by Mitsumasa Anno (1974)

Mysterious World

His first picture book was Mysterious Pictures published in 1968. It is hugely indebted to the work of optical illusionist M.C. Escher, whose work Anno came across on a trip to Europe. It prompted Anno to create his own impossible ascending staircases and upside-down scenes, Escher subject matter, but in Anno’s characteristic stick-men style. He continued this thread with teasing optical illusion pictures printed between 1969 and 1980 in the Japanese magazine Mathematical Science. Thus, if you look closely at the J in the illustration above, you’ll see it has an Escher twist.

Fushigi na E © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

Anno’s Journey

Anno broke through to the big time with his 1977 book, in Japanese A Picture Book of Travels, translated into English as Anno’s Journey.

Unlike the books mentioned so far, Anno’s Journey consists of immensely detailed pictures of natural scenes which are not simplified for children or laughs. Each picture shows a small figure journeying through the cultural and literary landscapes of a country in Europe, based on Anno’s own extensive journeys through Europe, noting the folklore, history and art of each country. He had been a Europhile since boyhood and in 1964 undertook a 40-day journey across the continent, which provided him with the imagery for the books.

The original was so successful that it sparked eight sequels, each focusing on a specific country – Anno’s Britain, Anno’s USA, Anno’s Italy and so on. The exhibition goes heavy on Anno’s Britain (1981) with as many as twenty prints from this one book. What they have in common is:

  • the image is thronged with minutely rendered detail
  • the subjects are an odd, uncanny mixture of actual places – famous landmarks such as the White Cliffs of Dover, Stonehenge, Big Ben – but reimagined among much older, non-existent historical buildings e.g. St Paul’s cathedral not surrounded by modern developments but by thatched cottages and Tudor beam houses

St. Paul’s Cathedral from Anno’s Britain © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

You could make much of this anachronistic reimagining (note the horse-drawn omnibus at the top right of this picture, and all the pictures of rural England are full of thatched cottages and half the inhabitants are wearing the kinds of frocks and bonnets which go back to the Civil War era), but what is perhaps most obvious is the simple imaginative freedom Anno feels. He is a tourist in what, to him, is a strange land, full of unreadable images and symbols, on a journey of discovery: why should anything make sense? Why should he make sense?

Papercuts

During the 1970s Anno produced a series of works using Japanese papercutting techniques. These are as different from the Journey books as can be imagined because they work with large and bold images, as opposed to the many tiny figures which pack out the Journey pictures.

He used the technique to illustrate a suite of Japanese folk tales, made designs for a pack of card games, and adapted the Hans Christian Andersen story The Little Match Girl in 1976.

The papercut technique brings out the basic elements of storytelling without words, reminiscent of the kami-shibai or ‘paper theatre’ format which would have been familiar to Anno from street entertainments before the war.

Scene 12 from The Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom by Anno Mitsumasa © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

The monochrome effect of black and white, and the starkness of the angular outlines, are all hugely at odds with the joyfully coloured, and minutely detailed, and often rather sensual curves and flourishes of his other work – reminding the viewer just how varied and imaginative his output has been.

The Tale of the Heike Picture Book

For me the highlight of the exhibition was a series of illustrations Anno made to the classic Japanese literary masterpiece, The Tale of the Heike. This is an epic account of the struggle between the Taira clan and Minamoto clan for control of Japan in the Genpei War (1180–1185). The text was compiled sometime prior to 1330, and is huge: it runs to over 700 pages in the Penguin classic translation, and is packed with conspiracies and battles, interspersed with diplomacy and – my favourite scenes – nights of wine and love.

The Exiling of the Ministers of State from ‘The Tale of the Heike Picture Book’ © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

Several things set these wonderful images apart from the rest of the work here. One is the medium: they are made from powder paint painted onto fine silk, an incredibly difficult medium to master.

And possibly related to this is the use of washes of colour. In the image above, notice all the tones of grey and greyish brown which he has used to create the atmosphere of dusk and moonrise, and also to convey the sandy quality of dried summer grass at the bottom left.

Anno’s illustrations originally appeared one at a time in the monthly magazine named Books, and there is a grand total of 79 of them, produced over seven years. The ten or so examples on display here are, for me, head and shoulders above everything else.

Partly because they are for adults, unlike almost everything else.

Partly because they deal with war, and so have highly dramatic scenes of ranks of samurai warriors on horseback charging each other, as well as tumbling over cliffs or (apparently) charging into rivers. Much action and movement!

But mostly for their sheer beauty. They are beautiful. The composition, the colouring, and the immense subtlety of the colour washes, make them by turns exciting, dramatic, or mysterious and evocative.

In and Around the Capital

There’s a selection from a series of watercolours Anno did depicting scenes from Kyoto, capital of Japan until the mid-19th century. These are bright watercolours which he produced for the Sankei Shimbun newspaper between 2011 and 2016, skilful and bright and featuring some wonderful landscapes all done in a very loose and relaxed style but, for me, paling in comparison with the works on silk.

Hōrin-ji, Arashiyama from Views In and Around The Capital © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Mori no naka no ie, Anno Mitsumasa Art Museum, Wakuden

Children of the Past

Most recently Anno has reverted to memories of his childhood with a series depicting idyllic memories of his childhood growing up in the small rural town of Tsuwano in Shimane Prefecture. There are scenes of children learning at school or playing in the countryside, all done in a deliberately naive, child-like style, and accompanied by text written as if a diary entry by his boyhood self.

Memories of Tsuwano by Anno Mitsumasa (2001) © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

These were sweet and lovely if you warm to the children’s book thread in Anno’s work. But I’m afraid my heart was totally lost to The Tale of the Heike Picture Book, and, having seen those pictures, nothing else here matched their intense and adult beauty.

Reading cove

The exhibition space at Japan House is one big white room downstairs. For this show they’ve had the simple but effective idea of converting the central part of the room into a reading area, carpeting it with soft black carpet, separating it off with black partitions, and strewing it with surprisingly comfortable white cushions. And placing racks of thirty or so of Anno’s books across the floor, a profusion of books and titles and images which, more than the wall labels, confirm how prodigiously prolific he has been.

I took full advantage of this comfy area to nab the only copy of The Tale of the Heike Picture Book and work very slowly through it, savouring all the illustrations. A couple of families were there with very small children and a baby. This reading nook provided a safe space to sit down with toddlers and show them the pictures, or encourage them to make up stories linking the often textless illustrations.

The reading space at the centre of Anno’s Journey: The World of Anno Mitsumasa at Japan House

The film

Downstairs at Japan House, opposite the gallery space, is a lecture hall-cum-small movie theatre. Alongside the exhibition, they’re showing an extended documentary film about Anno, with sub-titles chronicling his career, with lots of wonderful rostrum shots of his illustrations, and with interview snippets with the great man himself.

The merch

As you might expect, the shop upstairs is stocking a selection of Anno’s books (though not, I was disappointed to see, The Tale of the Heike Picture Book – the copy I looked at downstairs had a Japanese text: I wonder if it’s available in an English translation) – along with some funky Anno Mitsumasa stationery, playing cards and other merch.

This is a delightful way to spend a couple of peaceful, meditative and civilised hours. And it’s completely FREE.

Related links

Other exhibitions at Japan House

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 25, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Illustration, Japan, Painting
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 25, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/annos-journey-the-world-of-anno-mitsumasa-japan-house/

LGBT+: Diversity in Manga @ Japan House

Downstairs at the Japan House in High Street Kensington are the exhibition spaces. The staircase takes you down into a central atrium. On one side is the entrance to the medium-sized lecture theatre-cum cinema, where they hold events, talks and screen movies. Opposite this is the entrance to the fairly large exhibition room, currently devoted to a show about manga artist Urasawi Naoki.

And between them is a glass-fronted room which is the ‘library’. The word library evokes images of size, of big, wood-lined rooms filled from floor to ceiling with ancient tomes, and the idea of encyclopedic knowledge, of lots of books and information.

However, the library at Japan House is the extreme opposite. It amounts to just one wall of exquisitely selected books chosen to highlight the best of Japanese culture, selected by noted book curator Haba Yoshitaka.

Haba Yoshitaka

The curator of the Library at Japan House, Haba Yoshitaka, is a leading expert in the emerging field of ‘book direction’. The aim is to create innovative ways in which we interact with books. He recently gave a talk on his philosophy of book direction:

As conventional bookstores and libraries experience declining numbers, Haba aims instead to bring books to people and make them relevant and accessible to their daily lives. From the Japan House Library to specialized book areas in hospitals, nurseries and even Kyoto City Zoo, Haba has curated a wide range of book direction services for libraries at locations inside and outside Japan.

The Japan House ‘library’ is not, then, your average ‘library’.

Haba’s selection fills just one wall. Opposite it is a wall which plays host to changing exhibitions of books. It is currently showing a display of manga books addressing issues of gender and diversity.

LGBT+: Diversity in Manga

The display was organised to coincide with ‘Pride In London’ last month (June). It brings together about 50 manga from different eras, and from different genres, each of them depicting diverse representations of gender and sexuality expression. It’s designed to explore ‘the impact of Japanese manga culture on the understanding and perceptions of gender and sexual diversity in Japan’.

The LGBT+: Diversity in Manga display at Japan House

Japan is still a very conservative society. Manga, with its enormous appeal and huge range of audiences, has been a potent force in spreading awareness of modern ideas of gender diversity and alternative sexualities, especially among younger people.

The display picks out half a dozen key works and themes.

Women as men; men as women

Cross-dressing has been around as long as manga, with the great pioneer of the form, Tezuku Osamu, writing a story titled Princess Knight about a cross-dressing female knight, said to have been inspired by the theatrical troupe made up entirely of women among whom he spent his boyhood.

Many other cross-dressing characters have appeared in manga, including Oscar, a beautiful lady who dresses as a man to lead the Royal Guard in The Rose of Versailles, a strip set during the French Revolution; and the cross-dressing male university student Koibuchi Kuranosuke who appears in Higashimura Akiko’s Princess Jellyfish, a romantic comedy about a group of women who live in an apartment block.

The Year 24 Flower Group

The name refers to a group of female manga artists who were born around 1949 (Shōwa Year 24 in the Japanese calendar) and are said to have laid the foundations for contemporary shōjo manga (comics for girls). The movement included Moto Hagio, Yumiko Ōshima, and Keiko Takemiya.

Their works used complicated layouts and styles of expression which hadn’t been seen in girls’ comics before, and they also tackled subject matter previously not covered in girls’ comics such as science fiction and fantasy.

They emphasised characterisation and depicted romantic attachments between young men which eventually developed into the specialised manga genre known today as BL or Boys Love (shōnen-ai). (Hagio Moto herself, one of the ‘founding mothers’ of shojo manga (manga aimed at girls) was at Japan House a few months ago, discussing her role in these innovations. Irritating to have missed it.)

Boys Love

BL is a genre which depicts romantic and sexual relationships between men. The wall label discusses the various Japanese terms which have applied to these kinds of stories, implying subtle gradations in and distinctions, both within and beyond the genre.

Crossing boundaries

Many manga artists started out creating self-published dōjinshi works. One such is Yoshinaga Fumi whose manga Ōoku which applies gender-bending to early modern Edo-period Japan, creating a female shogun who is served by a harem of men known as the Ōoku. 

Gay art legend Tagame Gengoroh wrote the runaway best-seller My Brother’s Husband, on display here and at the British Museum’s manga exhibition. He also was in London earlier in the year to discuss his work. The blurring of sexual identities helps to blur boundaries between genres, as well, with plotlines becoming capable of greater latitude and variety.

A more recent addition is the strip What Did You Eat Yesterday? which chronicles a gay couple’s day-to-day life through the meals they share together. Sometimes it reads like a recipe book. Its quiet domesticity is another way of raising awareness and opening doors about same-sex couples.

Kumota Haruko

Another example of an artist who started out creating self-publishing dōjinshi is Kumota Haruko. She has published an award-winning series titled Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinku. Ragoku is a form of storytelling theatre.

The series features two ragoku performers, the attractively mature Yakumo, and the cheerful and talented Sukeroku. Their same-sex relationship is never overtly stated. Instead the reader is left to infer it both from their day to day interactions, and from the subtle hints included in the traditional stories they tell. The display includes original artwork from the series.

Takemiya Keiko

Takemiya Keiko’s ground-breaking manga Kaze to Ki no Uta (The Poem of Wind and Trees) was first published in 1976 and explores relationships between young men at a boarding school in France. It caused a scandal at the time due to its depiction of sex between men, but was quickly championed by enlightened critics. Nowadays it is seen as the seminal work of Boys Love manga.

Why France? I wondered. Was it more associated, in the 1970s, with decadence and sensuality? In this country, Britain, probably, yes, it always has been seen as more licentious and ‘immoral’. Seems a distant and remote location for a manga artist to choose, though.

Summary

Not quite worth making a pilgrimage for on its own account, unless you are particularly interested in LGBT+ manga, this is nonetheless a small, but perfectly formed and exquisite display, and the Japan House is well worth a visit if you’ve never been before.

Related links

Upcoming events at Japan House

Other reviews of Japanese art or history

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 28, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 28, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/28/lgbt-diversity-in-manga-japan-house/

This is Manga: The Art of Urasawi Naoki @ Japan House

This weekend is your last chance to see a comprehensive and FREE exhibition of work by the leading contemporary Japanese manga artist, Urasawa Naoki.

A montage of Urasawa Naoki’s manga characters which he created specially for this exhibition © URASAWA Naoki / Studio Nuts. Featuring: ‘Pineapple ARMY’ KUDO Kazuya ‘PLUTO’ NAGASAKI Takashi, Tezuka Productions, ‘MASTER KEATON’ KATSUSHIKA Hokusei, NAGASAKI Takashi, ‘MASTER KEATON ReMASTER’ NAGASAKI Takashi, ‘BILLY BAT’ NAGASAKI Takashi

The Japan House

Come out of High Street Kensington tube station, turn right, walk a hundred yards and you are at the entrance to the Japan House. Opened just last year, it is funded by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Inside it feels like a very classy boutique and most of the ground floor is, in fact, a shop, selling exquisite and carefully chosen specimens of Japanese fabrics, jewellery, books and so on, each one an example of the Japanese passion for monozukuri, meaning craftsmanship. Kitchenware, art accessories – brushes and paper and lots more, all chosen with exquisite taste and ranged in clean, precise displays.

Interior of the Japan House. Photo by the author

There is a stand-up coffee and tea bar. At the back of the shop (at the top left of this photo) is an area devoted to tourism, which features all kinds of maps of Japan, its cities and regions. As well as the ground floor boutique, there’s a stylish Japanese restaurant – AKIRA – on the first floor.

Taking the lift down to the basement, the visitor discovers there are three spaces here:

  • a lecture theatre which also doubles as a movie house and can host a range of events
  • a library display (basically a smallish room with carefully chosen books about all aspects of Japanese culture)
  • and the main exhibition space

The Art of Urasawi Naoki

It’s a surprisingly big room and contains a surprisingly large amount of material.

What comes over immediately is that URASAWA Naoki is a kind of rock start among mangaka. Born in 1960, he is considered a direct heir of Tezuka Osamu, the founder of modern manga. He has been hugely successful with over 100 million books sold in more than 20 countries. He made his debut in 1983 with BETA! and has gone on to create and/or draw a host of hugely successful manga characters.

There are about ten big stands in the exhibition, each of which introduces one of the lead characters which has made Urasawa’s name. Each one gives a longish explanation of the lead character and their main storylines and then display 20 or so pages taken from one of the episodes which shows the character in action.

This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

This display gives you a complete biography of Master Keaton, full name Taichi Hiraga-Keaton, son of a Japanese father and a British mother, an Oxford graduate and former Special Air Services officer. The various plotlines have followed Keaton across Europe as he ‘solves difficult cases, fighting criminal organisations and touching people’s lives’.

The same detailed treatment, with a full biography of the character, and then a sequence of characteristic strips, is given to all his other creations:

  • YAWARA!
  • MONSTER
  • 20th Century Boys
  • MASTER KEATON ReMASTER (Story by Takashi Nagasaki)
  • PLUTO (Story by Osamu Tezuka, co-authored by Takashi Nagasaki, Supervised by Macoto Tezka, with the cooperation of Tezuka Productions)
  • BILLY BAT (Story Co-creator : Takashi Nagasaki)
  • MUJIRUSHI (‘The Sign of Dreams’, with the cooperation of Fujio Productions)

In addition there are some massive full-colour blow-ups of various characters and scenes, dominating the walls. Some of these are deliberately designed for visitors to pose in front of and take selfies against.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

Behind the art of Urasawi Naoki

In the photo above you can see, over on the right, that there are flat display cases in front of some of the colour blow-ups. These display Urasawa’s early sketches and ideas for characters and scenes, and offer a real insight into the creative process. You can see sketches evolving into almost complete pages, then with words and dialogue bubbles positioned over the drawings – and then the final, finished pages as printed. One of the display cases shows the very earliest sketches and cartoons Urasawa made at school. In fact there are over 400 original drawings and storyboards on display! If you’ve heard of him, and like his style, this really is a fabulous opportunity to immerse yourself in the great man’s work.

Why is Urasawa so famous, why is his manga so distinctive? I must confess, I couldn’t really see why. Having recently visited the big, noisy manga exhibition at the British Museum, I feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of manga there is in the world. I have no idea where to start, and no idea how to make sense of the tens of thousands of stories produced by the thousands of artists for the scores of publishers, which keep on expanding in number every week.

Rather than make any attempt to explain Urasawa’s appeal I’ll copy out how the curators describe it.

Urasawa Naoki is considered a modern master in dynamic storytelling, with a unique approach to panel layout and cinematic sense of framing and rhythm. But even more so, he is considered a true master of character design. Each of his worlds hosts a wide variety of distinct, fully-rendered personas. His instantly recognisable faces come to life on the page with a wide range of expression. This talent can be witnessed on his storyboards, referred to as nēmu (‘name’) in Japanese, which reveal characters with expressions more precise and detailed than most manga artists. In this way, Urasawa defies convention to depict the diversity and sensitivity of the human race through his two-dimensional drawings.

Maybe I’m stupid, maybe I’m obtuse and imperceptive, maybe I just haven’t properly entered into the world of manga and its conventions, but I just couldn’t see this. Most of the faces, figures and characters I saw, particularly in the large blown-up images, looked very very similar to all the other manga characters I saw at the British Museum.

Here’s a typical display case of sketches with a blown-up figure behind it. I just couldn’t see that this image had a ‘cinematic’ sense of framing or a ‘distinct, fully-rendered persona’. I liked the detail of her hat and jacket and t-shirt, but I had the overwhelming sense that I’ve seen thousands of other images like this one, big-eyed, small-nosed, fresh-faced teens.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

The most novel feature of the exhibition was a kind of tent Urasawa has made from fabric strips running from the floor up to a central spine to create a ‘tent’ which visitors can walk through, getting very up close to a range of his characters.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

There was some variety of characterisation. In fact, the variety of faces reminded me of the panels you get inside the hardback editions of Tintin books, where you’re presented with a gallery of all the characters from all the Tintin stories. When I was a boy I used to love trying to identify them all.

But still. There were a lot of faces on the tent which seemed, to me, to be elementary, basic, entry level, manga faces. Wide-eyed children with tiny noses, mouths agape at some wonder.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

Probably I’m missing the point. Looking at some of the specific storylines, you could see how Urasawi had in fact created distinctive-looking individuals to be Master Keaton or the 20th Century Boys or the hero of PLUTO, and that there is a range of, especially older characters who are drawn with the individuality I associate with Tintin or Lucky Luke.

And when I looked at the display frames explaining the strip MONSTER these brought out the importance of Urasawi’s clever / innovative / imaginative use of screentones, the layering of shades or stippling or dots to create depth and atmosphere in the backgrounds.

Unfortunately, MONSTER – despite its enormous success (the first fully-fledged mystery story in manga, it sold over 21 million copies and became an anime TV series) – is about a serial killer and the pages the curators had chosen to display showed a series of people just shooting each other in the head, and I was so repelled that I turned away, without paying much attention to the backgrounds.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House, showing the protagonist of MONSTER, highlighting his modern ‘street’ styling (a bit Keanu Reeves), and the use of screentones to give cinematic depth to the image

As I strolled between recognisable, almost clichéd images of fresh-faced kids, and the altogether grittier style of something like MONSTER, I admit I was confused. Maybe I’m just putting into the words the difficulty I, a non-Japanese, who didn’t grow up on manga, have in really understanding the finer points and distinctions which seem to be extremely obvious to aficionados and fans.

More study required!!

A broader history of manga

Talking of study, alongside all the panels and display cases devoted to Urasawi Naoki, his biography, achievements, style and characters, and the detailed looks at the visual worlds he has created for individual strips – was another series of information panels about the broader history of manga, which I found in many ways easier to process, because they were dealing with straightforward facts, figures, dates and names.

Thus, in addition to what I had already picked up at the British Museum, I learned that:

  • Manga evolved from picture book styles developed in the post Edo period of the late 19th century
  • the modern form of manga was pioneered after World War Two by Tezuka Osamu, who is sometimes referred to as the god of manga
  • Tezuka introduced modern narrative techniques, complex characters and themes, and a visual language derived from cinema
  • His 1947 manga The New Treasure Island sold a huge number of copies and helped to crystallise the style and content of the new genre

But probably the biggest impression these information panels made on me was in conveying the scale and the speed of manga production, and the combination of extreme skill, with inventiveness, and prolific production rates, accompanied by a consistent style and level of quality, which is required for this high-pressure, high-profile and very demanding profession.

  • manga artists (mangaka) need to produce approximately twenty pages of strips every few days for magazines published on a monthly or weekly basis
  • typical mangaka work in a small studio with a few assistants under the supervision of a creative editor
  • if the series is successful it may be republished in a trade paperback named a tankōbon
  • it might also be turned into a TV series, a live action or animated movie

Further information panels gave good explanations of the visual codes which have evolved to convey emotion and meaning, the role of framing and the way the selection and framing of images creates a rhythm, the social context of manga immediately after the war and how successive generations of artists have added layers of sophistication, characterisation and, above all, an ever-expanding range of subjects to the empire of manga.

Summary

It’s FREE. It offers an in-depth understanding of the work and practice of one of the leading contemporary manga artists at work today. And the Japan House itself is a place of beauty to admire and wander round. And it closes at the end of tomorrow.

Get your skates on!

Related links

Upcoming events at Japan House

Other reviews of Japanese history or art

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 26, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 26, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/26/this-is-manga-urasawi-naoki-japan-house/

%d bloggers like this: