I'm a voracious reader and collector of pop culture, or quasi-pop culture. Anything weird and designy, funky and/or epic, cinematic, literate, and mythological I'm into. Asia: Japan (and to a lesser degree, China and Korea) produce such art and literary styles by the boatload.
I know there's a market for American and European works of Asian origin or influence. I know this for a fact because I'm part of that market demand.
Some books I've seen lately that reflect this demand:
- Fight Choreography: The Art of Non-Verbal Dialogue by John Kreng (Chinese-American Choroegraphy pro reveals many secrets of Asian cinema fight scene choreography in this book)
- Drawing Cutting Edge Fusion: My parents bought me that book as a gift. Fun light art reading.
- How to Draw Manga: Series that covers just about all the fundamentals of anime/manga drawing/design
- The Manga Start-Up Guide: Pen and Ink (has a Trigun cover). A bit more advanced.
- The Asian Influence on Hollywood Action Films by Barna William Donovan (one of my all time favorites. Takes a Western literary scholar approach to the best kind of action movie there is: The Asian Kind)
- The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga: One of the best Coffee Table Biographical books on an artist to come along in a long time.
- Akira Club, by Katsuhiro Otomo. One of Dark Horse's most beautiful and insightful books and collector's items ever.
I am a voracious academic, supporter, and collector of Asian production art reprints and knowledge about, and appreciation of, Asian pop culture. I read any book I can get my filthy little hands on, and study any wikipedia page that pops up on the subject. Lately I've been reading a lot of Wiki material on the French-Japanese connection, and the mutual respect and admiration the Japanese and French art scenes have for one another, Japanese and French artists have been collaborating quite a bit recently, and yet it isn't considered by the Japanese to be "Westernization" the way world manga from America is. I find this connection (that in a way almost seems like a pro-european double standard or bias in Asia) just fascinating. The French don't get half as much shit from the Japanese as Americans do for aping the Japanese style in other words. It's an interesting aspect of Europe, America, and Asia, to say the least. I keep asking myself, what can we (American artists and writers) learn from that kind of collaboration? Can American art be that successful internationally one day? Who knows?
