Abstract

This essay discusses the works of artists Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and Brendan Lee Satish Tang as they relate to manga and popular culture. Known as Haida Manga and Manga Ormolu, these hybrid works move through global circuits of exchange integral to a transcultural aesthetic where multiple signifiers have been folded and fused into one. Manga, like blue jeans and cell phones, unites viewers with universally recognizable themes in the art.

Yahgulanaas, a First Nations artist of mixed ancestry, introduced and developed “Haida Manga” by combining Japanese manga graphic novels with Haida narratives and formline , creating contemporary forms for old stories. In Coppers from the Hood, the traditional copper, an object of great respect and value in traditional potlatch ceremonies, is playfully replaced by car hoods sandblasted and painted copper with Haida Manga characters. Yahgulanaas' creative gesture demonstrates Haida is a living culture with an irrepressible power to innovate and transform.

Tang's Manga Ormolu ceramic sculptures subvert expectations of Chinese porcelain in Western culture through an uncanny amalgamation with war toys and techno-pop prosthetics. Japanese manga, found in fragments adjoining the Chinese vessel, points to the contemporary form of Orientalism where perceptions of Asia in Eurocentric nations are predetermined by cultural imports depicting transhuman dystopic futures of robot Armageddon. The distillation of ethnicity into one character-type is rendered ironically absurd. Strangely familiar, yet not quite the expected narrative of erotic and tranquil sublimity, these hybrid sculptures jar the Western viewer, and point to an oft forsaken subjectivity.