Chikara has been preparing for the new project.
As trying various styles and materials, he turned a corner of our living room/mokumoku studio into a painting studio.
Recently, Chikara works on digital art more often but it’s nice to play with paints and canvases sometimes. I love making physical painting a lot more than digital. I love how the distance between me and a painting gets closer and closer by every brush stroke.
Very excited to see how this project goes!!
Tomoko
I’ve organized an art event at a place very close to the hypocenter of the a-bombing in Hiroshima.
Although it was early in the morning of a weekday, 600 memorial paper fans we’d prepared to give out to the participants were gone. A lot of people showed up really.
It is hard to picture a place with 600 people gathering around. How about 200,000 fatalities from the atomic bombing. How is it different from 600 people. How about 50 millions who died due to the war. Nobody can imagine, probably.
And, even more unimaginable if one of them is who I love.
Today is the day that I pray for something nobody can imagine.
chikara
mokumoku studio is mentioned in Ryan Holmberg’s essay “More Corona Cartoons, Japan” at The Comics Journal!
We met Ryan on Instagram when we were daily posting the corona manga series #concoro. He is a manga and art historian and a translator. He kindly shared his story for us to make one episode in concoro. He has been researching comics influenced by the coronavirus outbreak and mentioned about mokumoku’s work in his essay which is now online at The Comics Journal.
We got connected to Ryan last April, when things were more uncertain than now and a lot of us were stuck at home. As the world was changing dramatically, we started the corona manga series with the urge to do something with art in this unprecedented time. The world seemed to be getting smaller and smaller at that time but meeting Ryan brought us a wider perspective and larger possibility. We are so thankful to Ryan for finding us!!
Tomoko Kakeda