HONOLULU.- The Honolulu Museum of Art kicked off a multi-year series of manga exhibitions with Visions of Angels: Japanese Manga by Takaya Miou.

Manga—Japanese graphic novels or comics—play a vital role in contemporary Japanese culture. Historically connected with Japanese woodblock prints and paintings (ukiyo-e), which were produced in Japan throughout the Edo period (1615-1868), the term manga was coined by the renowned ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Today annual sales of manga total more than $2 billion and they are the centerpiece of the Japanese government’s Cool Japan Initiative to promote the country as a cultural superpower.

In 2014, the Honolulu Museum of Art began to explore the art historical importance of manga in the exhibition Modern Love: 20th-Century Japanese Erotic Art. Since then, in its mission to expand and enhance its renowned collection of Japanese works on paper, the museum has acquired examples of Japanese manga by artists such as Maruo Suehiro and Anno Moyoco. Launching a manga exhibition series was a logical next step.

Stephen Salel, the Robert F. Lange Foundation assistant curator of Japanese art and curator of the exhibition, selected Takaya for the inaugural manga show for her cutting-edge, multilayered work.

In Japan, manga includes a wide variety of genres, from sports to domestic life. Takaya Miou, who lives and works in Nagoya, has created her own niche in the genre of fantasy.

“Her artwork explores themes of femininity and female identity through fantastic imagery inspired by a wide variety of artistic traditions, such as Italian Renaissance portraits of Christian martyrs, the intricate Art Nouveau style of British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and the surreal puppets of German sculptor Hans Bellmer,” says Salel. “The characters in Takaya’s stories—seraphim and lesser angels that one might expect in a painting by Peter Paul Rubens—are predominantly young women. And like Rubens, Takaya decorates her compositions with intensely baroque details—garlands of meticulously described roses, figures splendidly dressed in intricate Victorian outfits, and angels whose wings are so elaborately rendered that at times the remainder of their bodies disappear entirely. The classical elegance and splendor of Takaya’s images embody the artistic sophistication of Japanese manga.”

In addition to an overview of the artist’s 25-year career, Visions of Gothic Angels: Japanese Manga by Takaya Miou focuses on two anthologies, The Madness of Heaven (Tengoku kyō, 2001) and Map of Sacred Pain (Seishō-zu, 2001). Short stories from these publications are being presented in a variety of formats—original drawings, printed books (tankobon), large-scale wall graphics, and digital works that visitors can read from cover to cover on iPads installed in the gallery.