Arts and Letters

Yoshitaka Amano (b. 1952, Shizuoka, Japan) creates worlds. It’s something he’s done since he was fifteen, when he moved to Tokyo and began working as a character designer for an anime studio. There, drawing was always an act of translation. His task was to convert narrative into illustrated concepts, drawings that would become the connective tissue of a fictional universe. Throughout his career as an independent artist and as a character designer for storied anime and video game franchises, such as Final Fantasy and Vampire Hunter D, drawing has always been a way of describing the porousness between the real and the fantastic. “I want to depict a world I myself have never seen,” Amano says of the feeling from which his work begins.

Origins 始源 takes up Amano’s interest in primordial beginnings. Over the last few years, Amano has been absorbed in Greek and Shinto mythology, making drawings of the characters that animate these stories. Here, he presents Pandora, a series of drawings of the Greek myth of the first mortal woman; they circle the gallery like an ancient frieze, or the storyboards for an animation. Alongside these works, a selection of illustrations, animation, and popular materials from the 1980s and ’90s, including the anime film Angel’s Egg and sensual depictions of The Tale of Genji, is presented in our library. In all the stories Amano is drawn to, origins are an eternal structure, a threshold where being emerges. For him, that threshold is the page; his figures seem to move and drift across its surface, entering into worlds that exist beyond our lived reality.

This exhibition, Amano’s first institutional solo show in New York, offers a chance to encounter an artist whose drawings continue to have extended lives in the world around us. Right now, more likely than not, you could find them appearing on someone’s gaming console as they play Final Fantasy and livestream it to Twitch; on a Gatchaman Uniqlo tee worn in the streets of Tokyo; or even on an iPhone as someone watches Angel’s Egg on the subway, in bed, or really anywhere streaming is available.

Arts and Letters commissioned an essay, Shining Genji, by Sean Thor Conroe, which accompanies the exhibition as part of our Reader series.

Origins 始源 is curated by Noa Wesley, Assistant Curator.

Special thanks to GKIDS.

Major support for contemporary exhibitions at Arts and Letters is provided by Patrick Collins.

Arts and Letters exhibitions are also made possible by the Childe Hassam Fund, the Eugene Speicher Fund, the Huntington Exhibition and Museum Fund, the Wolf Kahn Foundation, and members of Arts and Letters.