Today I got in a fight with one of my closest friends- we were looking through a magazine, and I pointed out a manga I saw. We got in a stupid quibble about what the book was defined as, but that's not really the point. The point was that she rejected the manga as unauthentic because it was by an American author. Her point of view was, (from what I got of it) that it's a Japanese style, and is only genuinely grasped and realized by someone Japanese.
I disagree- I know and have seen many, many people who aren't of Asian origin, people who have never been to Japan in their lives, who draw brilliant manga. It's an art form, not a nationality- why should someone be constrained from doing what they love and putting said ideas to paper, because they weren't born in Japan?
Art has, over the course of the past year and a half, become a very defining factor in my life- I do my best to surround myself with it, and create the best art I can, with the best means I can. So maybe I'm not the most creative or talented of my group, or of the people I meet, but I'm trying- and that has to count for something.
Am I to believe that everything I work for, everything I have wrapped my life around, is null and void, is unimportant- that my artwork is not "real" because I wasn't someone else?
It doesn't make sense to me, and in fact, it does sting- the fact, that I can't do what I love, because I'm the same.
Tophet · Fri Aug 05, 2005 @ 04:12am · 0 Comments |