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By Gerald Heng
Exhibits in Angouleme are generally comprehensive, overwhelming, crowded and only in French. Mr. Heng has braved the crowds to provide us with snapshots of the Festival so our readers can get a general impression. Catalogs for the major exhibits are on sale, but often sell out during the show. By Saturday it will be almost impossible to move through these galleries.
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.
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