HB Gallery
Closes in 6 days
The versatility of Makoto Wada is practically endless: He is a graphic designer, illustrator, picture-book author, animator, movie director, lyricist and composer, essayist and more. Born in Osaka in 1936, Wada moved to Tokyo to study at Tama College of Art and is best known as one of Japan's most famous book illustrators.
As the title suggests, his exhibition at the HB Gallery (www.hbc.ne.jp/) is made up of 30 gouache paintings done especially for the show this year, with each depicting a self-contained manga scene. Even in its earliest forms, manga was not much more than a comic strip, but its entertainment value and intent was already high, and the significance of the form undoubtedly holds a place in the history of Japanese art. With this tradition in mind, Wada paints single-panel illustrations that tell stories with whimsical comedic tones, such as a giant sphinx watering a little pyramid or a maneki neko -- a Japanese beckoning money-cat -- putting money into a piggy bank. This light entertainment is a contrast to the intensity of much of manga as we now know it.
