TOKYO DESIGN WEEK “Hokusai Manga Inspired Exhibition”（Poster）
This work was part of the “Hokusai Manga Inspired Exhibition” at Tokyo Designers Week 2014. After hesitating for a while, I decided on the motif of a squid and an octopus, inspired by Hokusai’s painting of a giant octopus (but also for the simple reason that I love both). The picture isn’t something that I was having in mind from the beginning, but it just came out that way when putting myself in Hokusai’s position and drawing without thinking too hard. As the main ideas were to make it look like an ukiyo-e and to erase the traces of my own style, I eventually had it finished by a wood engraver (horishi) and a printer (surishi). When told that I had to give the work a title, the facial expressions of the two figures inspired me to name it “The octopus likes the squid, but the squid doesn’t like the octopus.”
