Pictures at an exhibition

I thought I'd post some photos that I took at the opening reception for the SugiPOP! exhibiton last Thursday evening. For a teeny-tiny museum, they got a lot of guests, and good press. The director said that there were over 200 people at the opening, and the show was on the front page of the Portsmouth newspaper.

The first room has some pretty traditional lovely Japanese woodblock prints, and some other wholly Japanese art. In the next room are rough drawings for an animated cartoon--maybe 40 of them. The third room has Seth's work, and the fourth room has that TV set, showing the whole of an animated cartoon in Japanese where Tofu sat enthralled, plus some animation cels. There are about eight rooms in all. On the whole it looks nice and tells a story of the collision of popular Japanese and Western styles of storytelling.

Incidentally the name SugiPOP! is another fusion of Japanese and American. "Sugi" is from the Japanese verb "Sugiru", meaning "to be too much", as in "Tabe-sugita": I ate too much. So the idea here is either that this is too much POP, or maybe that Japanese-American POP itself is too much, overwrought, over the top.

That's Hisako, Seth's wife, there with his work in the bottom photo.