GR2 recently celebrated the return of Japanese comics artist Katsuya Terada’s ‘Hot Pot Girls’. Aptly titled “Return of the Hot Pot Girls” (previewed here) his exhibition is an original series of girls wearing Japanese cooking pots, drawn in striking detail. At a live drawing event on Sunday, Terada shared his undeniable connection to French artist Moebius– “It’s impossible to keep away from what you like and enjoy.”
Opening tomorrow, Giant Robot’s GR2 brings back the pot-adorned girls of Japanese artist Katsuya Terada with “Return of the Hot Pot Girls.” We originally covered his intricate black and white marker drawings back in 2011. A skilled draftsman, Terada is perhaps best known in the States for his character designs for the animated film Blood: The Last Vampire, Iron Man and Hellboy. His new pieces contrast simple materials of pencil on paper and wood with detailed renderings of girls wearing Japanese “nabe” (Japanese hot pot dishes) paired with ferocious beasts. Creatures like tigers, bears, and eagles appear mid-flight as they wind around the compostions, shown here in these cropped preview images.
“People are always seeking what they believe,” young Japanese artist Takuma Onoda writes at his website. Being in Japan, he lives in a world with a shared reverence for traditional religion and pop-up culture icons like Hatsune Miku, or his city’s mascot, “Sento-kun”. He combines these contradicting ideas of idol worship into handpainted portraits of “Cyber Idols” that look three dimensional.
“Since I am not so good at making words to describe what I think and want, I choose to draw. And since I love to see the harmony in beautiful color relationships to emphasize
the stories among everything that surrounds me in the real world, what I see and what I draw, I choose to paint,” Mari Inukai shared at the opening of her GR2 show, “Marilla Blue and Orange.” The exhibition blurs the lines of her signature worlds, in terms of her narrative and artistic styles. In addition to her new paintings (previewed here), which she describes as a mixture of Taoism, harmony and balance, nostaligia, fantasy, reality and dreams, the show also features her process sketches.