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Lot Essay
The term manga was used by Katsushika Hokusai in his compilation Hokusai Manga (1814). Man suggests an impromptu or spontaneous attitude towards compiling material. However, Hokusai Manga is more like a picture album than a narrative of sequential images. As such, its definition is different from our contemporary understanding of manga, which revolves around a story. The manga we know utilises panels of varying sizes and sequential pages to construct a passage of time and cadence in order to tell a story.
Disney culture entered Japan after World War II. It stimulated the development of manga. However, Japanese cartoon took an entire unique path of their own. Osamu Tezuka established the manga studio Tokiwa-sō in Tokyo in the 1950s. It attracted major talents like Fujio F. Fujiko, Shotaro Ishinomori, and Fujio Akatsuka to enlist. Osamu Tezuka's manga incorporates science, history, philosophical thinking, and cinematic treatments in its content. Such richness elevates manga above mere entertainment — it inspires viewers to exercise their minds, and it stimulates their creativity. Osamu Tezuka's works heavily influenced countless emerging manga artists, accelerated the growth and broadened the horizon of the entire industry. His readership transcends the boundaries of demographics. Manga is without a doubt a popular and unique visual culture property. As such, Osamu Tezuka is often venerated as "the god of manga". Manga and anime are closely related to one another. Broadly speaking, when a manga is made into an anime, it signals the success of its story, and that it had garnered a large following. The production cost of an anime is very high, and the process is very time consuming. This is due to the fact that traditional animation requires artists to outline and colour each frame by hand, and it takes up to hundreds of thousands of frames to construct a smooth animation film. Each cel requires the animator to paint opaque pigments on transparent film on the reverse. Such process demands a high level of painterly skill.
We have chosen several important works by seminal manga artists to offer in the current auction. These original drawings by manga artists and animation studio shall serve as a bridge to help us explore the relationship between manga and contemporary art . As early as 1990s, Takashi Murakami postulated that in the future, both culture and art will become extremely flat. The characteristic "superflatness" of manga precisely embodies this unique property, and it gives Japanese contemporary art a strong sense of identity in the world. Numerous international artists included in this auction are influenced by manga to some extend. These include Yoshitomoa Nara, Hiroyuki Matsuura, Ayako Rokkaku, KAWS, Javier Calleja, and Chen Fei. It is evident that the stylistic features of manga such as, exaggerated character modelling, flatness, dominant sense of lines, and high saturation colours have a lasting impression on them, and the statement that Murakami made in the 1990s has proven to be quite prophetic.
Disney culture entered Japan after World War II. It stimulated the development of manga. However, Japanese cartoon took an entire unique path of their own. Osamu Tezuka established the manga studio Tokiwa-sō in Tokyo in the 1950s. It attracted major talents like Fujio F. Fujiko, Shotaro Ishinomori, and Fujio Akatsuka to enlist. Osamu Tezuka's manga incorporates science, history, philosophical thinking, and cinematic treatments in its content. Such richness elevates manga above mere entertainment — it inspires viewers to exercise their minds, and it stimulates their creativity. Osamu Tezuka's works heavily influenced countless emerging manga artists, accelerated the growth and broadened the horizon of the entire industry. His readership transcends the boundaries of demographics. Manga is without a doubt a popular and unique visual culture property. As such, Osamu Tezuka is often venerated as "the god of manga". Manga and anime are closely related to one another. Broadly speaking, when a manga is made into an anime, it signals the success of its story, and that it had garnered a large following. The production cost of an anime is very high, and the process is very time consuming. This is due to the fact that traditional animation requires artists to outline and colour each frame by hand, and it takes up to hundreds of thousands of frames to construct a smooth animation film. Each cel requires the animator to paint opaque pigments on transparent film on the reverse. Such process demands a high level of painterly skill.
We have chosen several important works by seminal manga artists to offer in the current auction. These original drawings by manga artists and animation studio shall serve as a bridge to help us explore the relationship between manga and contemporary art . As early as 1990s, Takashi Murakami postulated that in the future, both culture and art will become extremely flat. The characteristic "superflatness" of manga precisely embodies this unique property, and it gives Japanese contemporary art a strong sense of identity in the world. Numerous international artists included in this auction are influenced by manga to some extend. These include Yoshitomoa Nara, Hiroyuki Matsuura, Ayako Rokkaku, KAWS, Javier Calleja, and Chen Fei. It is evident that the stylistic features of manga such as, exaggerated character modelling, flatness, dominant sense of lines, and high saturation colours have a lasting impression on them, and the statement that Murakami made in the 1990s has proven to be quite prophetic.