7pm (Doors open at 6:30 pm)
To mark the closing of Beetles, Cats, Clouds, artist Akino Kondoh and curator Ryan Holmberg will lead a gallery tour and conversation exploring alternative manga, Kondoh’s experience of cartooning as a woman in Japan, and the intersections of manga, animation, and fine art.
Kondoh Akino, Never Before Named concept art, 2020-3
Kondoh Akino (b. 1980) grew up in the Tokyo suburbs of Chiba Prefecture and attended Tama Art University. In 2000, she received an award for her story “Kobayashi Kayoko” in Ax, an alternative manga magazine founded in 1998 by former editors of Garo. Melding the refined minimalism of traditional Japanese art with the imaginative flights of gothic fantasy, Kondoh’s exquisitely drawn and stylistically unique comics have ranged from surreal explorations of women’s identity and sexuality to romantic comedies and diaristic meditations. Also a fine artist, Kondoh has exhibited her drawings, paintings, and hand-drawn animated shorts at galleries and museums around the world, including in Japan, the USA, England, France, and China.
Her ongoing series Noodling in New York (2012–present) chronicles her daily life in the city, where she has lived since 2008. It and A-ko’s Boyfriends (2014-20), about a love triangle split between Tokyo and New York, are her most popular works. Kondoh’s manga have been extensively translated into French. While a few of her stories have appeared in English over the years, Glacier Bay Books’ forthcoming edition of her debut collection, Box Garden Beetle (2004), will be her first full book in English. She is also, like Yamada Murasaki, a lover of cats.
Ryan Holmberg is an art and comics historian, editor, and Japanese-English translator. He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (Bubbles, 2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). He has contributed numerous essays and reviews about art and comics to such publications as The Comics Journal, Artforum International, Art in America, and The New York Review. As an editor and translator of manga, Ryan has worked with Drawn & Quarterly, New York Review Comics, Breakdown Press, Retrofit Comics, PictureBox, Floating World, Bubbles, Glacier Bay Books, and Living the Line on over fifty books. His editions of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men (PictureBox) and Fujiwara Maki's My Picture Diary (D&Q) won the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia in 2014 and 2024, respectively. He has advised on manga-related exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (remote) and lives near Baltimore, MD.