A Compass for Contemporary Art: Guided by the Exhibition Connect and Expand(Crossing Borders and Expanding Fields of Expression)

Manga is one of the representative forms of expression in contemporary Japan. It is also widely recognized around the world, and its modes of expression continue to spread in every direction and evolve even now.

In the special exhibition “Connect and Expand”", currently being held at the Karuizawa New Art Museum, manga works and works influenced by manga are also on view. However, even when grouped under the single label of “manga,” the forms of expression that emerge from it are diverse. In this fourth installment, taking the exhibiting artists Erika Kobayashi, Yuya Hashizume, and Yuichi Yokoyama as examples, we explore the transformations of art that arise from the expressive form of manga.

Drawing the Invisible: Erika Kobayashi and “Children of the Light”

Erika Hayashi《Seeing the Light Irene Joliot-Curie》2022, 59.4 × 42.0cm, Silkscreen on paper

Erika Kobayashi is a writer and artist who works across multiple forms, including not only manga but also novels, essays, and installation. One of her representative works is Children of the Light, a three-volume comic work that depicts the history of radiation and its scientific background. Volume 1 was published by Little More in 2013, and while tracing the achievements of scientists including Marie Curie, its content gradually intersects with social concerns in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. By carefully presenting a complex scientific theme through character depictions and diagrams, the work came to be widely recognized in Japan for its educational and cultural value.

In this exhibition, centered on Children of the Light, original paintings for the book and related video works are combined in a configuration that allows viewers to experience its world through multiple media. Children of the Light: Lise Meitner and Children of the Light: Irène Curie (both 2022, silkscreen on paper, 59.4 × 42.0 cm each) re-present the figures of real scientists, who also appear in the comic, as independent artworks. In addition, Marie Curie’s Notebook 2.0µSv/h and Henri Becquerel’s Notebook 2.8µSv/h (both 2011) are three-dimensional works combining dosimeters, ink, paper, and silver leaf, directly drawing the “invisible force” of radiation into the material of the work itself.

Furthermore, in August 2025, the English-language e-book Seeing the Light: A Graphic Odyssey - with Cat - Through the History of Radiation was released, allowing its questions to reach an international readership as well.

Erika Kobayashi ”Seeing the Light: A Graphic Odyssey - with Cat - Through the History of Radiation” ©Karuizawa New Art Museum

What Kobayashi’s work consistently confronts are “invisible things” and “the voices of people buried in history.” Just as radiation itself is invisible, the human stories forgotten in the shadow of scientific progress are also difficult to see. The form of manga is chosen as a tool for giving contour to what cannot be seen. That is why her work, while remaining manga, can also possess multiple faces at once: a record, a testimony, and a work of art.

And, of course, manga as a medium is also something that people can own casually. Some works have been exhibited specifically for this exhibition, but manga, in its original form, allows people to receive the messages and stories it seeks to convey and to keep them in their own hands.

The Experiment of “Drawing” Time: Yuichi Yokoyama and Neo Manga

Yuichi Yokoyama originally worked in oil painting, but he chose manga as a form capable of expressing time. However, his manga differs greatly from what is generally understood by that term. There is no clear story. Instead, various people, objects, and landscapes move through his distinctive panel layouts and compositions together with forceful sound effects such as “dodododo” and “gorogoro.” This mode of expression, which differs from established styles, is called “Neo Manga.”

The work on display here, Neo Manyo (2023, PIE International, 264 pages), is a work in which Yokoyama selected 173 waka poems from the Man’yoshu and the Kokin Wakashu and used them as source material to compose 22 stories. Starting from classical Japanese poetry, the process by which an accumulation of stateless, futuristic episodes emerges allows readers to experience layers of time that are continuous and yet discontinuous.

Works by Yuichi Yokoyama ©Karuizawa New Art Museum

The exhibition also presents draft drawings used by Yokoyama during the production process. By comparing these sketches on paper made with pencil and pen (each 25.7 × 36.4 cm, year of production unknown) with the finished printed pages, viewers can trace the marks of “selection”: what was retained, and what was discarded. Because the work itself takes the passage of time as its theme, temporal changes in the production process also become part of the viewing experience.

In Yokoyama’s work, readers are not asked to “read” a story but to “feel” the flow of time. It is an intermediate sensory experience, different both from the conventional experience of manga and from the viewing of painting. While he uses the form of the panel, he intentionally suspends the panel’s original function of “advancing a narrative,” thereby summoning something else onto the page.

What Lies at the End of “Imitation”: Yuya Hashizume and the Inheritance of the Character

Exhibition View　©Karuizawa New Art Museum

Yuya Hashizume is a contemporary artist born in Okayama Prefecture in 1983. The entry point into his world of work is a human figure that recalls the characters of manga artist Fujiko F. Fujio. Known for the eyewater series, centered on the image of a girl with a single tear running down her cheek, Hashizume begins from the question, “Are all forms of expression built upon imitation and succession?” While referencing existing design and character culture, he constructs his own distinctive world of work.

In this exhibition, MONO Magazine Collaborative Serialization, 22 Works (2025, paper and printed matter, 54.0 × 42.6 cm each), a series of 22 works created for a collaborative serialized feature with the twice-monthly magazine Mono Magazine (World Photo Press), is lined up across the wall. A girl image was newly drawn for each issue in accordance with its theme, and the series possesses the paradoxical structure of deliberately placing artworks within the context of “consumption,” namely the pages of a mass-printed magazine.

By leaving the limited spaces of the museum and gallery and appearing in the mass medium of the magazine, Hashizume’s works reach readers directly in their hands. This is also an attempt to unsettle the boundary lines between “art and design” and between “fine art and consumer culture.” A single character is imitated across time, quoted, and transplanted into another context.

The girl figure has no specific name and no background. Precisely because the format resembles a single panel cut from a manga, viewers begin searching within their own memories for the meaning of that single tear. In this way, the image functions as a device that awakens the viewer’s imagination.

Yuya Hasizume《mono magazine, Collaboration Series: 22pieces》,2025, 54.0 × 42.6cm, Print on Paper, 22 pieces of Printed Matter

In addition, beginning on April 25, Yuya Hashizume will hold a solo exhibition at Whitestone Gallery Karuizawa, attached to the Karuizawa New Art Museum. It will be an exhibition that includes new attempts as well, and together with this special exhibition, it will provide an opportunity to encounter his newly updated world of expression.

Outside the Frame of “Genre”

Exhibition View　©Karuizawa New Art Museum

Kobayashi draws manga that visualizes invisible historical facts. Yokoyama borrows the form of manga panels in order to express the sensation of time itself. Hashizume, drawing from motifs reconstructed out of manga and character culture, stimulates the imagination. While using manga as a method, each of them moves in a completely different direction.

Within the vast ground of art, these three bodies of work demonstrate, simultaneously and independently, how the methodology of manga can be transformed. To question the boundaries of genre is also to question the possibilities of expression itself.

At the same time, while these works are exhibited on the second floor of the museum as objects of viewing, they are also sold as commercial publications in the bookstore on the first floor of the building.

At the exhibition, the works are displayed as artworks, yet in the shop the very same items are sold in quantity at low prices. By deliberately creating this condition, the museum places a question mark over the conventional image of art as something expensive and singular. In contrast to the apparent gentleness or cuteness of the works that have been produced, an extremely radical exhibition stance is being put into practice here.

As the title of the special exhibition, “Connect and Expand”, suggests, each individual work does not end in itself. By linking with the viewer’s memory and bodily sensation, it seeps outward beyond the exhibition space.

Connect and expand (Crossing Borders and Expanding Fields of Expression)