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.

---

^[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.

‘Politicians die, the cartoons live on’ - John Lent profiled in Polynesia

'Politicians die, the cartoons live on'

Saturday 30 August 2025 | Written by Teitimoana Tairi

https://www.cookislandsnews.com/internal/features/art/politicians-die-the-cartoons-live-on/

John A. Lent, professor emeritus at Temple University in Philadelphia, United States, is a novelist and renowned comic art scholar on a mission to document cartoonists from all around the world. TEITIMOANA TAIRI/25082913

A renowned comic art scholar is documenting the history of cartooning in the Cook Islands for his upcoming book, highlighting the importance of preserving the art form and inspiring the next generation of local artists.

A renowned comic art scholar is documenting the history of cartooning in the Cook Islands for his upcoming book, highlighting the importance of preserving the art form and inspiring the next generation of local artists.

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Book Review: Chester Brown

 Reviewed by Christina Pasqua, University of Toronto

Frederik Byrn Køhlert. Chester Brown. University Press of Mississippi, 2025. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Chester-Brown3

  

Earlier this summer, I bumped into Chester Brown while perusing the aisles at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. This was not an unusual occurrence, since we both live and work in the same city. I’ve seen him riding past me on his bike downtown and spotted him in line at one of the college book sales on campus. It’s safe to say that Toronto knows Chester Brown and Chester Brown knows Toronto. It’s where he launched his career in the early 1980s, and where back issues of his serialized comics can still be found in boxes at The Beguiling, a local comic shop founded in 1987. Sook-Yin Lee’s recent film adaptation of Brown’s graphic novel Paying For It (2011) stands out as a love letter to how quintessentially Toronto-based both his work is, and that moment in their lives was, especially as key figures in the city’s alternative scene. Frederik Byrn Køhlert’s Chester Brown, fifth in the University Press of Mississippi’sBiographix series, is a concise biography of the cartoonist’s life and work that is very much aware of his rootedness in the city. Early on, Køhlert notes how Brown circulated his self-published mini comics on the streets of Toronto before signing with Vortex Comics in 1986, and that he ran as a Libertarian Party of Canada candidate in the 2008 and 2011 federal elections in his riding. These details speak to larger themes that Køhlert’s book contends with, such as Brown’s fiercely independent and anti-authoritarian spirit, both politically and creatively, leading to the conclusion that when it comes to Chester Brown, it is “nearly impossible to separate the artist from the art” (10). While this can be said about many artists, Køhlert develops this observation into a strong argumentative thread that sustains the book; namely, that Brown is a transgressive thinker and creator with a clear interest in self-examination that he performs through an autobiographical mode that can be traced visually and polemically throughout his career. In particular, the book locates Brown’s self-reflexiveness in his dedicated use of paratextual materials to expand on his arguments about and personal experiences with sex, love, religion, and politics.

That said, the book is well conceptualized into six thematic chapters that place Brown’s life and publications in a chronology that outlines his contributions to the form and the broader status of comics production in Canada through Brown’s relationships with his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, and cartoonist contemporaries (and friends), Seth and the late Joe Matt. The book’s focus, however, is on the progression of Brown’s career through close readings of his changing visual technique, panel design, and storytelling methods rather than a study of Toronto’s “new wave” of underground comix. The first and second chapter, for example, highlight the narrative incoherence and surrealism of Brown’s early serialized work in Yummy Fur (1983-1994), which expands from fictional stories into esoteric explorations of Christian scriptures, such as the gospels of Mark and Matthew. Køhlert’s attention to the centrality of religion in Brown’s biography as a cartoonist distinguishes it from other critical work on the artist, but effectively shows how religious inquiry is a form of self-expression that resurfaces in Brown’s later work, most obviously Louis Riel (1999), a graphic biography of a nineteenth century Métis figure and mystic who led a rebellion against the Government of Canada, and Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus (2016), a visual adaptation of several biblical stories on sex and disobedience.

Besides religion, another commonality between these publications is Brown’s increasing visual minimalism and emotional restraint evident in the drawing style of both his autobiographical and nonfiction work, the focus of chapters three and four. Køhlert’s main contribution to the literature on Brown is laid out, however, in chapter five and expanded upon in chapter six, which consider the ethics of telling other people’s stories, the emergence of conspiracy thinking in his comics, and, most importantly, “Brown’s penchant for revision,” which Køhlert argues is “an attempt to produce a sense of retroactive continuity around the idea of ‘Chester Brown’” the author, the person, and the character (99). In practice, what this looks like for Brown is thoroughly rewriting, redrawing, and restructuring earlier versions of his comics, including detailed explanations of his visual choices and thought processes in the annotation section of his books, as well as in more intimate venues, such as letter columns and subscription-based social media platforms. Ultimately, what Køhlert’s biography shows through an analysis of various panels from and comparing different editions of Brown’s work is how the cartoonist relies on “the textual and paratextual tools available to him to . . . guide his audience’s understanding of both his comics and his current authorial persona.” (108). In other words, Brown perpetually attempts to craft and control his own narratives and public perception.

For an avid fan, collector, or scholar of Brown’s comics who has read the copious notes that accompany his publications, there is not much in this volume that is new when it comes to his biography and creative process. Much of these details are documented by Brown himself on Patreon and in print, and in the many interviews he has given over his forty-year career. However, Køhlert’s ability to synthesize this material into a cohesive narrative is impressive and important work that will certainly prove useful as a reference text for those who do not have access to or wish to expedite their understanding of this extensive, mostly public archive. That said, I would be curious to read more about Køhlert’s methodology for compiling Brown’s biography. For example, what details were included and excluded, or even omitted? Were new interviews conducted with Brown (and the people who know him) to help fill any gaps in the literature? Although some evidence of this research process is found in the acknowledgments and bibliography sections, as well as in the careful citation of journalistic interviews and academic conversations about Brown and his work, an account of how Køhlert constructed the narrative would be useful. Has Køhlert spoken with Brown? And if so, is he reconstructing the cartoonist’s life and work from the cartoonist’s own constructions?

I raise these questions not as a critique of the book, but rather as an acknowledgement that biographies as a genre often tend to take much of this processual work of coming to know for granted. What’s interesting about writing a biography about a person who openly shares his life and ideas in his comics is that reading his work can feel like one is encountering the author himself. As Kohlert suggests elsewhere, comics produce an “embodiment of the self on the page.” So, if Brown were to run into this version of himself, would he recognize him? And further, would he wish to revise him?

 

 Christina Pasqua is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and in the Book History and Print Culture Collaborative Program. She researches and teaches the study of visual Christianities in the Americas. Her current project focuses on the role of creativity and craft in how comic book artists read, interpret, and illustrate biblical stories within the context of their own lives. She also writes about autobiography, Catholic horror, and depictions of gendered bodies in popular culture. Her film criticism on these topics is published in The Revealer.