Hokusai Manga and Its Principles of Compositional Unity

Many consider Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), as one of the most popular and significant of all Japanese artists. During the course of his life, he drew and published picture books that he called Manga, usually understood as “random, whimsical, or funny pictures.” Evgeny Steiner studied Hokusai Manga – 15 albums that totaled 900 pages and of about 4000 subjects – for six years and prepared an edition of it with art historical research, providing translations of all its texts and commentaries to every picture. As a result, he contextualizes Hokusai Manga by placing it within the broader cultural milieu and offers a new way of looking at the formal mechanisms of a text-generation in pre-modern Japan. Steiner will discuss the principles of Manga composition and his discovery of a specific compositional structure that he calls renga (連画), instead of renga (連歌).