Manga is the Japanese word for comic strip, and the multi-coloured universe of war and love, eroticism and mythology, science fiction and everyday life in the Japanese graphic stories has now achieved huge international popularity with millions of comic sold every month.  
The exhibition Manga! Japanese Images is a historical introduction to the universe of manga, illustrated by comic books and cartoon films, and offers unique insight into the pictorial universe on which this worldwide cultural phenomenon is based. The exhibition shows how the Japanese comic-book culture has developed, where the visual tradition manga comes from, and where it is heading, with examples that range in time and medium from woodcut to comic-book, from book illustrations to cartoon films and from computer games to contemporary art. Today manga is not only comicbooks, but a widespread culture with ramifications in many other areas such as cartoon films and computer games. It has also left clear traces on contemporary art. Three important figures from the Japanese contemporary art scene will be represented in the exhibition: Kenji Yanobe, Tabaimo and Kumi Machida. 
 

Historically manga goes back 200 years. It was originally the famous Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai (1769-1849) who called his drawn portrait sketches manga. But before Hokusai too there was a tradition of showing drawings – often caricatures – of personalities (for example actors) in Japanese woodcuts. They were printed in mass editions to be distributed widely as advertisements for the theatre; so the tradition of mass-producing popular pictorial narratives existed long before the comic books as we know them today, and this is one of the things that can be seen at the exhibition.

Manga! Japanese Images is on view at Louisiana between October 8 2008 and February 9 2009