Hokusai X Manga: Japanese Pop Culture Since 1680 - Softcover

Nora Von Achenbach; Simon Klinger

3.47

15 ratings by Goodreads

9783777426679: Hokusai X Manga: Japanese Pop Culture Since 1680

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3777426679 ISBN 13: 9783777426679

Publisher: Hirmer, 2016

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Anime and manga are powerful pop-culture phenomena, capturing people's imaginations in the pages of comic books, on television and smartphone screens, and at cosplay festivals, where children and adults alike don elaborate costumes and share creations based on the original art. Somewhere along the way, many of these cute, stylized characters jumped the Pacific, and we too became smitten with Hello Kitty and collecting adorable Pok mon. But this isn't the first time artists embraced popular culture and enjoyed enormous commercial success. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, and their contemporaries produced colored woodblock prints of beautiful courtesans and brave samurai for the masses. Hokusai x Manga offers fascinating insight into the most widely consumed examples of popular culture in the history of Japanese art. Woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, were a central medium of early mass culture, and they served as a fantastical escape from everyday life. As Japan transformed into a modern nation and society, the demand for popular art didn't disappear, and the forms were merely adapted from one cultural context to another, changing to reflect the high-energy urban streets of Tokyo, but retaining many of the basic elements. Dozens of lively, colorful images--from shunga sheets to selected excerpts from manga by Jiro Taniguchi, Inio Asano, and more--are interspersed throughout the book, making Hokusai x Manga as fun to read as it is informative. Hokusai x Manga will give Japanophiles and pop-culture enthusiasts everywhere an entirely new perspective and on these captivating chapters in the history of Japanese art.

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Review:

"The anthology does a wonderful job of exploring the art form's origins and providing cultural context behind its mass appeal. . . .Visually mesmerizing."--Shelf Awareness for Readers

"Hokusai X Manga: Japanese Pop Culture Since 1600 makes the case that many older cultural and historical forces shaped the evolution of manga into the popular form that is known today....It is visually rich and generous in reproductions."--International Examiner

About the Author:

Sabine Schulze is an art historian and director of the Museums f r Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, where Nora von Achenbach is head of the East Asia Collection and Simon Klingler is a curator.

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