Angoulème 2020 Exhibit Review: Yoshiharu Tsuge, 'être sans exister'

  

Yoshiharu Tsuge, être sans exister. Stéphane Beaujean, Léopold Dahan and Xavier Guilbert. Angoulème. Musée d’Angoulème. 30 January - 15 March 2020.

 

The Angoulème International Comics Festival continued its mission to consecrate an important mangaka with a major exhibition devoted to the life and work of Yoshiharu Tsuge. The exhibition was installed in the same space in the musée d’Angoulème that was reserved over the three previous years for similar exhibitions that elevated Kazuo Kamimura, Osamu Tezuka and Taiyo Matsumoto to the wider festival audience (and beyond). Être sans exister follows the template set out by those earlier exhibitions by intertwining biographic information with historical, industrial and cultural contexts to individuate Tsuge’s narrative and aesthetic style.

 An incredible collection of over 270 pages of original artwork, almost all of it being displayed outside of Japan for the first time, provides the visual support for the exhibition’s reconsideration of Tsuge’s place not only within the history of postwar manga, but also his contributions to the development of comics as an artform. 

Close readings of the displayed pages intelligently highlight how Tsuge transitioned from his early commercial work (where his debt to Tezuka is undisputed) toward a more personal individual style that used oneiric narratives and open-ended endings to express his inner preoccupations and demons. A highlight of the exhibit in this context is the presentation of Tsuge’s surreal 1968 tour de force La Vis (translated in English as “Screw Style”), which is presented in its entirety by the original pages of  artwork.

 

first page of "La Vis"

This artistic breakthrough hinted at a personal cost as Tsuge’s work began to incorporate darker, introspective themes that foregrounded the psychological toll that his characters endured within their rigid social environments. These autobiographic undertones informed Tsuge’s later travel narratives, which suggested a retreat from the constrictions that were plaguing the fragility of his personal life and mental health.

It is this very relationship between artistic expression, formal innovation and psychological intimacy that the exhibition illuminates to position Tsuge as a comics artist whose work deserves a thorough reappraisal. A handsome catalogue has been published by the festival that reproduces the entire text and images of the exhibition to serve as a fitting record of this living artist whose body of work reveals the personal hardship endured in a search toward a semblance of inner peace. 

 

 Nick Nguyen   

All photos taken by Nick Nguyen

A version of this review will appear in print in 22:2, but the exhibit is currently open at Angouleme, France through the weekend.