Word: japanized
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Though Halloween may be a Western holiday, if you want to read horror comics this week, you'd do better turning to Japan. The wealth of material being imported far outpaces the amount and quality produced domestically in the horror genre. Three outstanding recent releases range in style from a twist on the teenagers-in-peril subgenre (Junji Ito's Museum of Terror) to extreme gross-out humor (Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl) to a disturbing medical thriller by Japan's most revered comix creator (Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito...
...various publishers of translated manga, Dark Horse comics has distinguished itself in publishing superior horror titles, releasing five different multi-volume horror titles this year alone. Among them were two that should not be missed: Junji Ito's Museum of Terror and Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl. Arguably Japan's premier horror manga-ka, Ito has a fevered imagination that has given us Uzumaki, about a town beset by spirals, and Gyo, about dead fish that sprout legs and wreak havoc upon the land. Museum of Terror (two volumes so far, $14 each) collects the so-called Tomie tales...
...myself when I saw the pictures of a flood of trash floating on a Jakarta river and bike commuters wearing masks to protect themselves from toxic diesel fumes in Kanpur, India. Those are the same scenes we saw in Kitakyushu and other cities in the 1960s and '70s, when Japan was notorious as the archipelago of kogai, or environmental disruption. I was one of the victims of the choking smog at that time. Asians are starting to put more pressure on their governments to tackle staggering environmental problems, but time is running out. Having seen Japan recover from its environmental...
Such is the case with Australian art. Until recently, the nation's cultural treasures have rarely registered on the Japanese radar. "It's sports, nature and bushfire, koala and kangaroo," Nakayama says of the popular perception. But with the 2006 Australia-Japan Year of Exchange marking the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the two countries, museum director Norio Shimada together with Nakayama, who completed her fine-arts masters at the University of Adelaide, decided the time was right to add depth to the Australian image. Which is how 70 works...
...exhibition so sensitive to these cross-cultural currents, Piccinini's final room strikes the one false note. This singular Sierra Leone?born artist, whose mutant monsters speak of a genetically engineered future, seems more interested in nurture than Australian nature. And while Japan's appetite for cute creatures makes it easy to see why the curators found them irresistible, it's difficult relating them to the rest of the show...