Exhibit Review: Background at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Poland

 Reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Background. Ewa Borysiewicz, Barbara Trojanowska, and Jakub Woynarowski (curators); Bartek Buczek and Emilia Kina (exhibit designers); and Magda Budzyńska (graphic designer). Kraków, Poland: Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. May 17 - September 15, 2024. https://manggha.pl/en

Fig 1. The exhibition space for Background at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. Photo by José Alaniz.  

 

 With a field of vision encompassing what felt like a US football field, the cavernous confines of Kraków’s Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology[1] proved the ideal venue for “Background,” an exhibit all about spatial relationships in art and life.

Curated by two art historians and an artist,[2] the exhibit centered, in the words of its introduction:

the role of the background as an active component, one that interacts with its surroundings. Its agency lies in its capacity to initiate and influence events. This, however, unfolds along a logic different from human reasoning. The background engages in interactions with characters, but its influence is more subtle than that exerted by human actions.

Rather than positioning “background” and “characters” in mutual opposition, we aim to present them as complementary elements of a narrative. We seek to highlight a mode of experiencing reality that is not solely centered on human narration but open to non-human perspectives, conveyed through representations of natural features and elements such as rocks, water, wind and plants. These enable narratives to unfold outside human measures of time and often independently of human notions of purposefulness, tending to focus on utility.

     And while the exhibit’s focus resonated with the Humanities’ turn to Posthumanism and New Materialism – e.g. Mel Chen on animacy, or Jane Bennet’s “vibrant matter” – Background destabilized other oft-unexamined presumptions in art, like the distinction between original and copy, the standard account of modern art’s development in Western Europe, even the traditional hierarchies about what counts as art and gallery space.[3] As the introduction further put it: “Dividing the spheres in which people realize themselves creatively into ‘pop culture’ and ‘high culture’ is an arbitrary convention.” Take that, Clement Greenberg!

Even the conventional gallery lighting scheme was subverted, with vast stretches of darkness as central to the experience as were the angled wooden vitrines (elegantly crafted works of art in their own right) designed by Bartek Buczek.

Moreover, exploring these aesthetic/philosophical matters through Japanese graphic narrative and related forms made tremendous sense, given manga’s well-known use of interludes, unpeopled landscapes and other contemplative modes that punctuate the storytelling in ways relatively rare in more “action-driven” national traditions.

Attempts to dethrone the primacy of foreground figures in Western European and US comics have mostly been the province of the avant garde; cue “posthuman” cinematic works like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (to pick one prominent postwar example). In comics, we have experiments like the Swiss artist Niklaus Rüegg’s SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling) (“Spook: Theses on Spring,” 2004), which removed all the characters from a set of classic Donald Duck comics, leaving only the settings (empty rooms, bare lawns). Perhaps no Westerner has done as much in this vein as the conceptualist Greek-Belgian artist Ilan Manouach; see his Noirs (2014), in which the background in a sense overflows the foreground, such that the “black” Smurfs blend in to the point of illegibility.

As the show’s organizers declare, the value of foregrounding background comes down to how the move nudges a viewer to displace a human-centered positionality, even a single-point perspective, in favor of a broader understanding of space/time – to such a degree that some works abandon the figure itself, passing on to abstraction. And again, while we see some of this in the “inverted perspective” of Byzantine religious art, Background demonstrates that Asian artists were doing this for much longer and in more diverse ways. In fact, one of the ancillary lessons of the exhibit is how much of the material we might think of as modern has ancient correlates.

To that end, the exhibit featured reproductions of backgrounds used in cult anime productions; 19^th-century woodblock prints; comic books by Yuichi Yokoyama, Tiger Tateishi, Satoshi Kon and others; poster designs; textiles; ceramics; and video game elements by FromSoftware and Kojima Productions, to name a few.

Fig 2. Katsushika Hokusai. Woodblock print from his A Garden of Pictures (Kokusai Gaen, 1843), with waterfall as barcode. 

None stopped me in my tracks like two works from the famed master Katsushika Hokusai (of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa fame). An ukiyo-e print from his A Garden of Pictures (Kokusai Gaen, 1843) shows a fairly conventional landscape dominated by a waterfall. But it’s how he renders the cascading water itself that struck me: with several vertical brushstrokes varying in thickness. They looked like a barcode. That same eerie time warp feeling – like seeing a period portrait of Abraham Lincoln with an iPad – was heightened still further by another Hokusai, a sample pattern from his Banshoku Zukô (Designs for All Artisans, 1835). Here he dispenses completely with figuration, leaving nothing but barcode. Mind-bending.

A series of large posters commemorating Japanese urban spaces by Koichi Sato approach the austerity of a Rothko in their utter refusal to straightforwardly depict their stated subjects. Instead, you get what resemble a colorful detail of a sunset in The Golden Pond (1995) or an effect of looking up at a starless sky in Urban Frontier — Tokyo ’96 (1996), with the off-frame city’s glow pulsing in the bottom half of the frame. A very full emptiness.

Whereas Koji Iyama’s Nippon poster series (n.d.), while strongly recalling the dour Suprematism of an El Lissitzky, takes a more playful approach. Iyama transmutes the Japanese word for Japan, Nippon (rendered in kanji as 日本), into increasingly abstract shapes of geometrical precision. Dominated by white space, these images dissolve the distinction between foreground and background – yet, quirkily, they still signify “Japan.” 

Fig 3. Koji Iyama’s Nippon poster series (n.d.), playing off the kanji rendering of the Japanese word for Japan.

For all its modernist sheen, though, Iyama’s posters have early 19^th-century roots, as pointed out to me by co-curator Woynarowski. It was then that Japanese monk/painter Sengai Gibon executed his ink drawing popularly known as Circle-Triangle-Square (Maru-sankaku-shikaku, ca. 1825), aka The Universe. Just as someone today might reflexively try to scan Hokusai’s waterfall with their phone, Sengai’s 200-year-old drawing would not look out of place in a 20^th-century avant garde exhibit. We may well read Iyama’s jokey Nippon series as an homage.

Background presented comic art primarily in book form, opened to ambient pages from Seiichi Hayashi’s Red-Colored Elegy (1970); Tiger Tateishi’s colorful Moon Trax (2023), showing non-representational shapes paired with/riffing off of Hokusai’s aforementioned famous wave (which brought to mind Eisenstein’s plasmatic line), as well as his Cheat Sheets (2023), its alien environments strongly recalling Jim Woodring’s Unifactor; and Yokoyama’s Travel (2006) and Garden (2011). 

Fig 4. Display of Yuichi Yokoyama’s works.

 

Fig 5. DayDream Gaming’s Elden Ring — Ambient Walking Tour (2023), based on the videogame Elden Ring (2022) by Hidetaka Miyazaki.

The latter, with their propulsive traversal of a surreal milieu, paired well with the YouTube channel DayDream Gaming’s Elden Ring — Ambient Walking Tour (2023), based on the videogame Elden Ring (2022) by Hidetaka Miyazaki, and Death Stranding – Relaxing Walking in the Rain (2023), based on the game Death Stranding (2019) by Hideo Kojima. 

Here there is no background – or if you will, everything is background, i.e. environs for the characters, backs turned, to explore. These videos last for hours, with no action other than the figure’s movement through the fantasy surroundings. The effect (I’m told) is hypnotic, mesmerizing, what Woynarowski called “a highly contemplative mode of storytelling.” Tarkovsky for the 21^st century. Or maybe Casper David Friedrich, his Romantic subject not just pondering the sea of fog, lording over it, but plunging into its animated depths.

The exhibit provided a number of wall-mounted screens for visitors to view the walking tours. It also displayed some pages from Elden Ring: Official Art Book Vol. II (2022), the better to appreciate the background art. 

Fig 6. DayDream Gaming’s Death Stranding – Relaxing Walking in the Rain (2023), based on the game Death Stranding (2019) by Hideo Kojima.

Another section sampled the detailed backgrounds from cult anime works like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), coupled with clips and selections from the original manga version (1982), and other Studio Ghibli classics. I was taken by Toshiharu Mizutani’s Akira, Cut No. 1 (1988/2023), a lovely color solegraph of a Tokyo cityscape carved in twain by a massive thoroughfare, like the Grand Canyon. Mizutani served as art director on the film version of Akira (directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988).

Fig 7. Toshiharu Mizutani’s Akira, Cut No. 1 (1988/2023).

 Background was a triumph, the perfect marriage of subject, venue and execution. It more than fulfilled its remit, powerfully demonstrating how in these astounding Japanese works the background achieves a status as important as the actors – if not more so. I also very much appreciated how the show’s design encouraged the visitor to wander; it had no order, no beginning, no end. No foreground except what you chose.

“We didn’t want to create a linear story, but many existing stories,” said Woynarowski.  “This underlies our idea that there is no center in this structure, just as there’s no foreground and background. We wanted to focus on non-human environments, non-human stories. Of course, man is still present here, but it’s not the most important part of the story. It’s decentered.”

In our era of Anthropocene, with human activity destroying the planetary biosphere, nothing and no one can ever really escape … us. Woynarowski and I talked about that too as we navigated the gallery space. But to Background’s achievements I would add this: any experience that gets us to think – even momentarily – beyond human concerns and human egoism is crucial. It’s a step out of the very deep, very dark hole we’ve dug for ourselves.   

As the show’s introduction put it, “the background is not neutral: it has agency and is often governed by a non-human logic.”

That may be our only hope.  

 

[1] The Museum was founded in 1994 at the behest of film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), a great devotee of Japanese culture.

[2] Borysiewicz is a co-editor of MOST, an online journal devoted to Eastern/Central European contemporary art/culture; Trojanowska is a curator at the Manggha Museum; and Jakub Woynarowski is a noted contemporary artist, comics artist and director of the Narrative Drawing Program at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts (see interview elsewhere in this volume).  

[3] Background even encompassed within itself an entirely separate, unrelated exhibit!

 

Exhibit Review: Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open

Reviewed by Carli Spina

Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open. Brooklyn, New York: Brooklyn Public Library. June 28 - September 30, 2025. https://www.bklynlibrary.org/exhibitions/tove-jansson-and-the-moomins

 

For the summer of 2025, Brooklyn Public Library hosted Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open, in honor of the 80th anniversary of the publication of the first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood. Covering both Jansson’s life and the Moomins’ place in international popular culture, this exhibit was claimed to be the first U.S. exhibit to focus on the Moomins and their creator, Jansson.^[1] The exhibition was spread throughout, and even outside, the Central Library space. When approaching the library, visitors were immediately drawn in by Moomin characters decorating the windows of the Children’s Room and, at night, projected on the outside of the building on either side of the main entrance.

 

Once inside, the exhibit was divided across multiple areas of the Central Library. In the lobby just inside the main entrance, two large displays featured Jansson’s book, with one to the left focused on her Moomin books and one to the right highlighting her adult fiction. These displays featured multiple editions of the books in multiple languages to show the international impact Jansson’s writing and illustrations have had.

 

Beyond these displays, as visitors walked further into the lobby, there were large structures decorated in the style of Jansson’s illustrations and with reproduced illustrations and archival images. One of these structures was in the form of a house that visitors could walk around and inside to meet the core Moomin characters, and see reproductions of Jansson’s illustrations of them. The other structure was designed to look like an open copy of The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first book Jansson wrote about these characters. This display discussed that book, but also introduced visitors to Jansson herself with archival photos of her life and work as well as biographical information, including her important place in Finnish art history as a queer female artist. Also in this area, a third structure had a built-in monitor showing a tour of the Moomin Museum in Tampere, Finland, which produced this exhibit and has an extensive collection of Moomin art and other pieces related to the characters, such as the six-foot-tall model of the Moomins’ house that Jansson created in 1979.

 

On the first floor, the exhibit continued in the youth wing of the library. In this section, the Moomins took over, with decorations throughout the space. There were two child-sized Moomin play areas, which were perfect for photos. The space also displayed multiple Moomin posters with Jansson’s art and display cases that ran along one wall with various Moomin books open to engaging examples of her art. This space also had a browsable collection of Moomin books in multiple languages available for in-library use.

 

The exhibit continued on the second floor in display cases that lined the balcony overlooking the lobby. These cases included materials related to both Jansson and the Moomins. On one side of the balcony, two examples of Jansson’s other artistic work were displayed alongside letters she wrote to friend and fellow artist Eva Konikoff during Konikoff’s time in New York City. These letters provided a personal insight into Jansson’s life during the early 1940s and also show a connection to the city hosting the exhibit.

 

To the left side of the balcony, several cases highlighted a selection of the products that have featured the Moomins, showing the impressive range of products that have incorporated these characters. These included ceramics by Arabia, created with designs by Jansson’s partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, collectibles released in partnership with Finnair, licensed clothing and jewelry featuring the characters, and a variety of types of toys. Another case focused specifically on the various media that Moomins have appeared in with plays, LPs, games, and cartoons all represented from around the world. This section of the exhibit impressed upon viewers the global reach the characters have had and also the careful stewardship that Jansson and her family have exerted over their licensing.

 

The exhibit delved fairly deeply into Jansson’s biography to offer context for her work and it was this component of the exhibit that probably interested those who have an existing knowledge of the Moomins the most. While the Moomins may be the most eye-catching element of the exhibition, the archival images of Jansson brought her to life in a way that many readers of the Moomin books may not have experienced in the past. Explanatory text introduced viewers to Jansson’s life as a child and offered context for her decision to start working as a freelance editor at age fifteen to help support her family and lessen the burden on her mother, the family’s primary breadwinner. Though this exhibit focused on the Moomins, it went well beyond these characters to explore Jansson’s larger artistic life, highlighting her work as a painter, illustrator for others’ works, and writing for both children and adults. Painting, in particular, was important to Jansson throughout her life and the exhibit made this clear in multiple locations, including by displaying her palette and examples of her paintings. 

 

The exhibit was complemented by programming, not only at the Central Library, but also at other branches of the Brooklyn Public Library system. These programs included children’s craft programs, and programs for adults. On September 16th, Jansson’s niece, Sophia Jansson, was scheduled to lead a guided tour of the exhibit.^[2] As an exhibition hosted by a library, it is no surprise that Jansson’s works were also available in multiple languages for browsing in the library as part of multiple displays across the library and for checkout. These books included not only the Moomin novels, but also her adult fiction and books about her life. Offering these options for library patrons gave those who visited the exhibit a chance to immediately dive into the Moomins’ world and learn more about Jansson’s life and work, which is sure to lead to more lifelong fans. If you’re already a fan of the characters and their author, this exhibit was a worthy glimpse into the 80-year history of the Moomins and the important and impactful life of their creator.

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^[1] Moomin 80. June 6, 2025. The First Ever Moomin and Tove Jansson Exhibition in the U.S. Opens at Brooklyn Public Library. Available at https://www.moomin.com/en/blog/brooklyn-public-library-moomin/#02ac7e82 . Accessed July 3, 2025. However in 2021, IJOCA ran a review of a Moomin exhibit in Washington, DC that can be found at https://ijoca.blogspot.com/2021/12/exhibit-review-moomin-animations.html

^[2] Brooklyn Public Library. nd. Tour of Tove Jansson & The Moomins. Available at https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/tour-tove-jansson-moomins-central-library-dweck-20250916-0700pm. Accessed July 3, 2025.

Exhibit Review: Peter Kuper’s Insectopolis

  Peter Kuper’s Insectopolis: A Natural History. New York: Society of Illustrators. May 14 - September 20, 2025. https://societyillustrators.org/event/insectopolis/

reviewed by José Alaniz

 

The late naturalist and myrmecologist E. O. Wilson casts a long shadow over the exhibit Peter Kuper’s Insectopolis: A Natural History, and indeed over much of the celebrated cartoonist’s environmentalist-themed recent works, such as the new non-fiction book of the same name (2025) which inspired the exhibit and the graphic novel Ruins (2015). So it makes sense that Wilson would get star billing at the show, via a prominently-placed (and famous) quote: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. But if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”[i]

That pretty much encapsulates Kuper’s stance towards the insect world: one that exists in parallel with ours, closely overlapping it, while remaining for the most part unseen. Yet (as Wilson’s quote also implies) that parallel world is under threat like never before in the last ten millennia, i.e., since humans started mucking up the planet. Catastrophic biodiversity loss — including of insects — is a feature, not a bug (sorry) of late industrial capitalism. It didn’t have to be this way, but it seems we moderns have forced a choice between economic prosperity and a livable, breathable biosphere. Not the brightest move, as our descendants will likely conclude, and as some today are already screaming to deaf ears.

Anyway, Insectopolis (the show and, for that matter, the book) stands as a rebuke to that sort of thoughtlessness, inviting the visitor to open their eyes to the dazzling, astonishing diversity and profundity of arthropod life on this shining blue orb. “There are estimated 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects,” says a helpful label. “That’s 1.25 billion for every person on Earth.”

Kuper has loved bugs for a long time (there’s even a photo of him as a nine-year-old, contemplating a moth), but the exhibit had its origins when the artist was researching his book at the New York Public Library as a 2020-2021 Jean Strouse Cullman Fellow. Pandemic-era restrictions meant he spent a lot of time on his own, exploring the renowned, and now virtually-empty library. The depopulated site suggested to him a post-apocalyptic setting, which he took up for the book’s framing sequence (seemy Kuper interview). Kuper also created an exhibit of the work-in-progress, called “INterSECTS,” in part of the library.[ii]

The second floor gallery of the Society of Illustrators is a rather different space. Cozier. You have to negotiate more corners. It can get crowded fast. But the tight confines work quite well to suggest almost a hive-like structure, like you’re traversing a giant termite colony. (This is probably not the best show for claustrophobes.)

That feeling of compactness begins at the narrow stairs; you have to let someone come down before you can go up. There are colorful monarch butterflies glued to the front of each step, leading you on. Kuper has lined the wall of the staircase with prints from the monarchs’ journey in Ruins, as well as with maps showing their 3,000-mile migration from North America to a pine forest in Mexico. It might make you feel like you yourself are on the precipice of a long journey.

That journey takes you through vast tracts of time as well as space, from the comet cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, through all of Homo sapiens history, East and West, North and South, above and below ground, in the skies and in the oceans. Insects are everywhere, and they’ve been around forever (or it might as well be forever: since the Devonian period, over 400 million years ago). That’s a lot to cover.

Kuper breaks that daunting story into sections, some with whimsical names, that focus on particular insects and/or the people who studied them: Cicada’s Brood, Ant Farm, Bee Kind, Entomologists and Naturalists. Among the latter you’ll find both the usual suspects (Rachel Carson, Margaret Collins, Alexander von Humboldt) and for some, the unexpected (Osamu Tezuka!). QR codes link you to the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis reciting his poem “A una Mariposa Monarca,” to evolutionary biologist Jessica Lee Ware discussing dragonflies, to professor of Entomology Barrett Anthony Klein dishing on dung beetles. (Kuper carried over these QR codes from the book.)

There are lots of other amusing touches, such as a reproduced ad for an ant farm, the sort the young Kuper would have sent away for. Throughout the space, monarchs seem to flutter above on the ceiling, all over the walls, even in the men’s room. Some of these prints stand out in relief, casting shadows against the surfaces to which they adhere. Kuper also drew a line of ants directly on the wall. In fact, cartoon insects inhabit much of the real estate not already taken up by Kuper’s framed artwork.  

That artwork, of course, is the real star of the show. It’s always a delight to get up close to comic art, to see what an artist inks and what they leave as pencils, how much they erased, what they corrected on the page vs. what they will fix or alter in digital. It doesn’t hurt at all that Insectopolis features Kuper’s most meticulous, elaborate drawing, from Cretaceous-era foliage to the classical facades of the NYPL. And lots and lots of lovingly-rendered bugs. I was quite charmed (and saddened) by a page from Insectopolis’ cicada section, of said creature burrowing up over four vertical panels, only to discover that, while it was hibernating over the last 17 years, humans had tarmacked its path forward. It got Aida’ed.

I also appreciated a color nightscape of lightning bugs placed in the “Nabokov niche,” with a quote from the famous Russian-American novelist/lepidopterist: “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple — these are our faithful timekeepers” (this quote concludes the book version of Insectopolis).^[iii] Not all the art, incidentally, is tied to Insectopolis or Ruins. Kuper throws in his 2009 portrait of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.  

A labor of love from a fully committed artist with a mission to educate, Insectopolis is a small but terrific show. Of course, for all Kuper’s herculean efforts, the exhibit can only begin to hint at the aforementioned dazzling, astonishing diversity and profundity of arthropod life on this shining blue orb. It’s the perfect companion piece, nay, extension to the book; almost like a wonderful pop-up version brought to life.

“I hope this exhibition will open visitors up to a newfound appreciation of these tiny giants that help make our world go around,” Kuper says in his artist statement. To give the visitor a sense of all we are losing as our insect biosphere contracts, as we keep putting development over butterflies, Insectopolis presents us with an artistic ecosystem, modest in scale but vast in meaning.

 

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[i] A simplified version of a passage from Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (1992).

[ii] Peter Kuper’s “INterSECTS” took place January 12–August 13, 2022 in the Rayner Special Collections Wing of the  NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The famous one, with the lions.

[iii] The quote comes from Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.