Katsushika Hokusai: Hokusai Manga, 10, 1819 © UNSODO. Inc
Japaneseism met with a wave of enthusiasm in European art. Impressionists discovered the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1867. Every little water lily by Monet breathes the spirit of Far Eastern aesthetics. Today you can still find inspiration through Japanese prints in popular culture. Advertising, fashion and even environmental associations adorn themselves with what is probably the most famous motif. Hokusai’s wave is considered a timeless icon of sublime beauty. The Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne is showing the traveling exhibition “Manga Hokusai Manga” in honor of the pioneer of modern printing art, which was conceived under the direction of Jaqueline Berndt. She has taught at various universities in Japan, Germany, Singapore and Sweden. The manga expert explains in an interview why Hokusai not only presents a story about the sheer violence of nature, but also about the transience of human life in Hokusai’s works.
Anna Maria Loffredo: Jaqueline BerndtWho are you? What are you doing?
Jaqueline Berndt: I see my home in comics studies. I earn my money as a professor of Japanese culture at Stockholm University.
Anna Maria Loffredo: You will be in Cologne on October 4th.
Jaqueline Berndt: Yes, because the exhibition “Manga Hokusai Manga“, which I designed for the Japan Foundation, will be opened. The first stop in 2016 was the Japanese Cultural Center in Rome. One was planned World Traveling Exhibition for ten years. There should be fewer originals than prints or reproductions on panels so that they can be shown in different locations. She hasn’t been to Spain yet, nor to Sweden.
Anna Maria Loffredo: What is not can still become. You designed the exhibition in 2016 and we have 2024 – two more years to go.
Jaqueline Berndt: The panels should start to look a bit dirty [lacht]. I’m looking forward to Friday. I am pleased that the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne has taken the initiative to bring the exhibition to Germany.
Jaqueline Berndt at a manga lecture, photo: private.
Anna Maria Loffredo: With Hokusai you have chosen an evergreen. It was current in 2016, it is current in 2024. You can see it, for example, in everyday and pop culture, fashion brands like Uniqlo or H&M sell…
Jaqueline Berndt: The big wave. It is an icon and received worldwide. I can still remember that in 2018, on the occasion of 150 years of diplomatic relations, we had an exhibition in Stockholm with Hokusai’s illustrations for longer stories in book form, black and white, so much closer to comics and manga than the famous color woodcuts, such as the individual sheets of the series “36 Views of Mount Fuji” which includes “The Great Wave” of Kanagawa.
Anna Maria Loffredo: With Hokusai, the audience comes on its own, or how do you help?
Jaqueline Berndt: The poster for the Stockholm exhibition showed the big wave, which had nothing to do with the central exhibits, but attracted people.
Anna Maria Loffredo: Hokusai runs almost everywhere, last year in Museum of Fine Arts Bostonthis year in Leiden.
Jaqueline Berndt: Hokusai has been very popular in recent years, also in art history. We had the big exhibitions in Berlinin Parisnow there was another one in London. And at every Hokusai survey exhibition in the last ten, you’ll find the word “manga” somewhere in the catalog, apparently to attract young people. But of course the “Hokusai Manga” doesn’t have much to do with current comics.
Anna Maria Loffredo: How do you then create the bridge between Hokusai then and manga today?
Sawa Sakura, Portrait of Hokusai 2015 © Sawa Sakura
Jaqueline Berndt: The title of our exhibition is “Manga Hokusai Manga”: Two types of manga frame Hokusai. His work is called “Hokusai Manga” and we have put manga in front of it again. The central idea of our exhibition is to start from our current experience of Japanese comics and to look back from there instead of proceeding chronologically, i.e. not to simply assume that the “Hokusai Manga” are the origin of current manga. We suggest the audience discover differences and similarities without prescribing a particular view.
Anna Maria Loffredo: The last exhibition I saw of yours was in Museum Rietberg in Zurich. I thought the small, participatory stage setup was nice so that I could become a comic character in the middle of a scene.
Jaqueline Berndt: Yes, in 2015, when we designed the “Manga Hokusai Manga” exhibition for the Japan Foundation, incorporating playful elements was not an option. Using visual materials, we tried to stimulate a dialogue between generations: between visitors who feel addressed by the old woodcuts and those who are familiar with current manga comics.
Anna Maria Loffredo: How can I imagine the concrete structure of the exhibition?
Jaqueline Berndt: In the first chapter we present Hokusai as a character in manga stories, in the full spectrum of Japanese genres, that is, from the more realistic, historical depiction to Boys’ Love. We were confronted with contemporary portraits of Hokusai. We then draw attention to distinctive features of comics: the telling in image sequences, or more precisely panel layouts, as well as movement lines, speech bubbles and sound words. The excerpts from the Hokusai manga show that it was not about narrative and sequential things. In terms of form, there are actually hardly any similarities to today’s comics. After all, the Hokusai manga were a template book for copying. And copying is exactly the keyword for the last part. Because if we want to discover similarities between today’s manga culture and that of the past, then it’s probably best to find them in the large number of amateurs who like to draw themselves and who copy them in order to share popular motifs with each other.
Anna Maria Loffredo: Can this be understood as a gap between amateurism and the artist as genius, a central theme in art history?
Jaqueline Berndt: The Hokusai manga became bestsellers because there were so many interested parties in Japan who simply wanted to trace and copy, not to stand out as original, but to share a certain reservoir of images and motifs. That’s exactly what you find in today’s fan culture. From an outside perspective, some people think that what the fans are doing looks the same, lacking any originality in the drawings.
Anna Maria Loffredo: Is there a favorite picture of yours in the exhibition outside of the well-known wave?
Jaqueline Berndt: In the last part we asked six Japanese illustrators if they could make us an original for the exhibition. Three short stories were created in the form of illustrations, each with eight pages and three individual items. And what I find most exciting of the works, of course, is the short story by Okadaya Tetsuzohand very realistically drawn.
These are the minutes before Hokusai’s death. He sits there with his daughter, draws and is almost blind and says he doesn’t really want to die because he wants to draw so much. I would recommend that anyone interested in the exhibition get involved in his visual life. Unfortunately, the Foundation did not want to fund the translation. The nicest thing would have been, like in the British Museum, to have the original Japanese pages and a translation in the margins. But if you go around the world with it, you have to work with a lot of languages and AI wasn’t that developed yet. But you can still hold the camera on it with your own smartphone and translation software will give you the necessary orientation.
Katsushika Hokusai: Hokusai Manga, 11, c.1823-1833 © UNSODO. Inc
Anna Maria Loffredo: Reading in Japanese is a problem for us Europeans anyway.
Jaqueline Berndt: Exactly, the Japanese reading order is from right to left. Especially if you have vertical writing, you go from top to bottom and move from right to left. So you would no longer print horizontally from right to left. But now the images consist of pages with speech bubbles. A Japanese visitor to the exhibition also reads these pages from right to left. You can’t just set up the exhibition the wrong way around, as happened to the curators in Bologna.
Anna Maria Loffredo: You have in the Japan Foundation, in the Rietberg and then Nicolas Mahler exhibited in Kyoto (at the Manga Museum). Which project would you like to implement in the future?
Jaqueline Berndt: To be honest, exhibitions don’t really appeal to me. What I liked about Rietberg was that I encountered openness and respect for an innovative concept and that a fresh approach was valued there. In Japan it usually boils down to confirmation of what is known.
Anna Maria Loffredo: But I hear a good bit of criticism there.
Jaqueline Berndt: As you know, in science it is important that we consider at least two perspectives on the same thing. Things often look different in a cultural-political context.
Anna Maria Loffredo: In order to reach your own informed judgment. A good reason to go to the exhibition. Thank you for the interview, Jacqueline.
Jaqueline Berndt: Gladly. See you in Cologne!
04.10.2024 – 30.11.2024
Opening on Friday, October 4, 2024 at 7 p.m
With an introductory lecture by Prof. Jaqueline Berndt, Stockholm University, Sweden
Manga Hokusai Manga
Ort
Japanese Cultural Institute
Universitätsstraße 98
50674 Köln
admission free
Website Prof. Dr. Jaqueline Berndt:
© Shiriagari Kotobuki 2015 © Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints
