i have been creating for myself and other professionally for over 15 years now, primarily in the pen and paper role playing gaming business. i have had the opportunity to be exposed to a great many artistic styles over the years from 70's sci fi to steampunk and I have taken pieces from them all to create my style. I happily include anime and manga in my bowl full of influences as I have been reading and watching since the early eighties.
However, over the last few years, I have noticed that young people have increasingly incorporated the Japanese Aesthetic into their art. This in and of itself is not a problem, as I have clearly illustrated, we artists incorporate a great deal of what we have picked up through observation into our work. My issue lies elsewhere and it is a problem I have on the Macro with a great many of us black creators and on the Micro specifically with the black anime and manga crowd. A have observed that lot of us black artists tend to gravitate toward a few mindsets.
1.Either we reject our cultural artistic heritage in favor of a more eurocentric asthetic." MACRO"
2.We celebrate the aesthetics of asian artists, particularly the Japanese "MICRO"
3. We overcompensate by Egyptifying our work, when Egypt was just one of the great many advance African civilizations
4 We use the urban expressionism and the visually artistic elements of hip hop culture to express ourselves.
While I have either large or small issues with each one these manifestations, I find our celebration of all things Asian, TO THE EXCLUSION of our own culture ghastly to say the least. II have meet very well respected artists of African decent who have extolled the artistic and social virtues of the Japanese the exclusion of all others. Some I have talked to have visited Japan , basically, as tourists or in finite programs. So they ultimately have no idea what day to day life is for people of non Japanese decent.
While it is fine to like an aesthetic, it is my personal belief that no aesthetic holds rank superiority over another.So when these individuals essentially viliify anything not having to do with ASIA artistically, they not only pigeon hole themselves as artists, they fail to see what their own culture contributes to the artistic mix. Thus these people are just as maliformed artistically as a guy who thinks that western art styles are the end all and be all. Or a black guy who feels he has to create a black version of the popular white superhero.
We should sit back as artists and examine what truly motivates us. We as black people suffer from Stockholm Syndrome and it is no surprise that we don't like anything that looks like us but gravitate towards things created by people who look totally opposite.
We just have to be honest about this as artists, so we can use our art to examine who we really are.
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