Manga Exhibition, British Museum: Interview with the curator UEA's Nicole Rousmaniere (2019)

Manga are Japanese comic books or graphic novels with a twist, serialised in magazines and read by a global audience. A multi-billion-pound business that embraces anime and gaming, manga are a global phenomenon and have forged a new international visual language. The original translation of the characters for manga was ‘pictures run riot’, associated with the great 19th-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai whose miscellaneous drawings of people, animals and nature were published as ‘Hokusai Manga’. Since then, however, the medium has evolved to become a form of immersive story telling with unique characters and embracing universal issues. The Citi exhibition Manga will bring to life the art of manga, looking at how it emerged in Japan and grew to be a worldwide cultural phenomenon. It will explore manga’s enduring appeal and cultural crossover, showcasing original Japanese manga and its enormous influence, from anime to gaming to ‘cosplay’ performance art.

Featuring unprecedented loans from across Japan, the exhibition will reveal the inner-workings of this billion-dollar industry. The exhibition design and interpretation will transport visitors into the immersive world of manga. Visitors will be able to enter a rendering of the oldest surviving manga bookshop in Tokyo, go inside the artists’ world, meet the manga editors and be ‘manga-fied’ in a special photo booth. Audio and video installations will help bring the world of manga and its characters to life. The exhibition will also explore Manga fandom through big conventions such as Comiket and World Cosplay summit, immersing the visitor in the experience of one of these events, as well as providing an opportunity for visitors to try on a costume and share via their own photos.

A full public programme of events will accompany the exhibition. More information on this programme will be available nearer the exhibition opening. In May, the beautifully illustrated exhibition catalogue Manga, will be published by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with the British Museum.

The exhibition is being curated by Sainsbury Institute Research Director Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, who is also IFAC Handa Curator of Japanese Art at the British Museum.

The Sainsbury Institute is proud to be supporting the The Citi exhibition Manga マンガ at the British Museum.

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Are you going to the Manga Exhibition at the British Museum or have you been? What did you think?