What Do Manga Exhibitions Show Us?

The Osamu Tezuka Exhibition (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1990) 
  
　One starting point for thinking about manga exhibitions—which have become active in recent years—is the Osamu Tezuka Exhibition, which was held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.  The idea of a national art museum holding an exhibition for one manga artist made quite a splash. In combination with the Kawasaki City Museum, which was opened in 1988, becoming the first public museum to establish a manga collection, this essentially endorsed the holding of manga exhibitions by national and public art museums.At the same time, such exhibitions arguably showed how to exhibit original manga drawings in a white-cube gallery space, an issue that would also be tackled for future manga exhibitions. 

ATTACK ON TITAN FINAL EXHIBITION (Mori Arts Center Gallery, etc., 2019 to 2020) 
  
　Around the late 1990s, people started actively holding manga exhibitions focusing on one artist or work at art and other museums, department-store exhibition halls, and other venues. This resulted in the establishment of a methodology that went beyond simply hanging the original drawings on the wall and having visitors read them. Instead, various features, videos, and other techniques were used to give visitors the chance to experience the worldview of each work throughout the exhibition space in which the original drawings and explanations of them were displayed. 

The ATTACK ON TITAN FINAL EXHIBITION was arguably a high point of this approach, which struck a balance between large-scale, painstakingly created features and videos on the one hand and a clear portrayal of the appeal of the original drawings themselves on the other.

Inoue Takehiko: The LAST Manga Exhibition (The Ueno Royal Museum, etc., 2008 to 2010) 
  
　In 2004, Takehiko Inoue used a closed high school building as a site for a series of manga illustrations drawn on 23 classroom blackboards for his successful "SLAM DUNK: 10 Days After" exhibition. Based on this experience, he ran another exhibition at which he preemptively told his “last” "Vagabond "story—a work being serialized—by fully exploiting the structure and size of an art museum’s space to draw “frames” of various sizes instead of simply exhibiting original drawings of previously published works. Inoue called this "spatial manga", which arguably represents a new way to produce, publish, and experience manga. 

18,000 Original Manga Drawings by TSUCHIDA SEIKI (Kyoto International Manga Museum, 2014) 
  
　At this exhibition, all of the approximately 18,000 original drawings left behind by an artist who passed away at the age of 43 were displayed. The artist’s original drawings were stacked up in exhibition cases, and they were also spread all over the floor under tempered glass so visitors could walk right on top of them. 

Through this unusual exhibition method, the museum showed the all-consuming passion devoted by this artist to his job as a manga artist. Instead of attempting to show the essence of an artist based on the works selected by a curator, this exhibition was an attempt to resonate with the artist through the nature of the exhibition itself.

Ballet Manga - Leap above the beauty - (Kyoto International Manga Museum, etc., 2013 to 2014) 
  
　Although art museums have started holding more manga exhibitions, the fact remains that there are still a lot of manga exhibitions held at department-store exhibition halls and similar venues, and most manga exhibitions are essentially sales promotion events as far as publishing companies and other work right holders are concerned. Exhibitions in which multiple artists/works are collected in line with a single theme as opposed to one artist/work require negotiations with multiple right holders and therefore tend to offer fewer advantages to the right holders. 

For the "Ballet Manga - Leap above the beauty - exhibition"—which traced the genealogy of ballet manga, itself important in terms of the history of shōjo manga—these difficulties were overcome, elevating the survey and research results of the parties involved in the curation to the level of an exhibition.

Exhibition: Drawing Manga! (Oita Prefectural Art Museum, etc., 2015 to 2017) 
  
　Under the supervision of the manga critic Gō Itō, this exhibition focused on the job of drawing manga as well as the inheritance of manga techniques and related innovations. The exhibition covered not only important artists from each decade after WWII until the present but also manga left behind by young men who died in action as members of Special Attack Units, as well as dōjinshi (self-published work) culture and the online media pixiv, which support Japan’s manga culture, thereby drawing attention to the importance of the fact that the fun of drawing manga has penetrated a wide general audience.    

This exhibition was organized independently by the Oita Prefectural Art Museum and held in the summer of the year the museum was established. It subsequently toured five manga and art museums throughout Japan. The exhibition involved the cooperation of many manga specialists, curators, and researchers, and it therefore showed the high level of Japanese manga research and exhibitions.

THE Doraemon Exhibition (Mori Arts Center Gallery, etc., 2017~) 
  
　For this exhibition, various works that expressed "Doraemon" based on the interpretation of numerous Japanese artists—including Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Kayo Ume, Sebastian Masuda and Kotobuki Shiriagri—were collected. This manga character, who is loved by the people, was used as a common element to bring out the individuality of each artist. 

In addition, because this exhibition can be enjoyed even by visitors who are not familiar with contemporary art, it is also an opportunity for such visitors to gain an interest in the respective artists. The exhibition enables visitors familiar with Doraemon to take a fresh look at the work and its characters from various perspectives. 
It has toured Takaoka, Nagoya, Osaka, and Niigata, Sapporo and Kyoto, and is scheduled to open at Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art in April 2022.

Manga: Short Comics from Modern Japan (Maison de la Culture du Japon à Paris, etc., 2001 to 2004) 

As a result of the increasing popularity of Japanese manga overseas, exhibitions of such manga are also being held there, including Europe, America, and various Asian countries in particular. Perhaps the first successful example of such an exhibition is this one, which was held by The Japan Foundation in France. 

The exhibition was supervised by Fusanosuke Natsume, a leading authority on manga representation theory, and Atsushi Hosogaya, who had been involved in many manga exhibitions as the then-curator of the Kawasaki City Museum. It focused on short stories that could be completely read within the range of the exhibition and used partition-screen reading exhibition devices and other approaches to show French intellectuals the high artistic level of Japanese manga. Due to the exhibition’s popularity, it later toured various regions of Europe.

The Citi exhibition Manga (the British Museum, 2019) 
  
　This exhibition of the British Museum caused quite a stir as the largest example of a manga exhibition ever held outside of Japan, and it was hugely successful, attracting around 180,000 visitors over a three-month period. Such a grand line-up of exhibited artists and works would have been extremely difficult to achieve in Japan and might not have been possible without the influence of the British Museum as viewed by Japanese people. 

Given that Japan’s last attempt to hold an exhibition that comprehensively shows the overall picture of post-war Japanese manga was the "MANGA Age" exhibition held by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 1998, one cannot help but wonder why an exhibition that was not possible in Japan was possible in the United Kingdom.

MANGA ⇔ TOKYO (La Villette (France), 2018 / the National Art Center (Tokyo) and Oita Prefectural Art Museum, 2020~21)


　The 9th Venice Biennale: International Architecture Exhibition, "OTAKU: Persona = Space = City "(2004)—which was curated by Kaichirō Morikawa—was a successful attempt to present the relationship between the extensive range of otaku hobbies—including manga, anime, and video games—and the transformation of the urban space known as Akihabara. This exhibition homed in on how the urban space known as "Tokyo" has been represented as a stage for manga, anime, video games, and special effects. The exhibition, which was held at La Villette in France in 2018 followed by the National Art Center, Tokyo and the Oita Prefectural Art Museum in 2020.