Hiroki Kikuchi, whose real name is Hiroki Kikuchi, has reduced his manga creation and put more effort into design, illustration, and photography.
The graphics of his work are as delicate as a circuit board, combining the fun of underground manga from the 1960s in the West and Japanese shonen manga, and the work as a whole shows a kind of gameplay, often flowing between absurdity and innocence.
△ Works by Hiroki Kikuchi
In particular, some works exude an inconspicuous cruelty, which intuitively shows the living conditions of the characters in the concept of the law of the jungle and social Darwinism, and through ridicule, expresses his own unique views on certain social problems in Japan.
In 1995, when he was young, his manga "fruits" was selected for the Nagai Katsuichi Award, and began to create manga, in his debut work "Fruits", the author showed a high sense of rhythm through the exaggerated expressions and body movements of the characters, and the smooth switching between the storyboard grids.
He was deeply influenced by modern and contemporary Japanese literature, especially the work of Kenzaburo Oe, whose evaluation of the Nobel Prize for Literature was that "there is an opportunity to transcend language and culture, a new insight, and poetry full of condensed images, which eliminates barriers such as language."
The genes from modern and contemporary Japanese literature make his works appear to be marginalized, while at the same time intervening in the current Japan.
△ Hiroki Kikuchi's "Fruits"
While paying attention to the occurrence of Japan and participating in the occurrence of Japan, the author also presents a state of "small self", or "self", which extends beyond the works and forms comments, just like the works of Kenzaburo Oe, Yasube Kombo and others.
But the author does not fully refer to these authors, but focuses on the picture to form his own style, a visual expression composed of pictures, surreal, and wants to reach an extreme state.
Hiroki Kikuchi spent more time creating illustrations than manga, which also affected his manga creation.
In manga works, キクチヒロノリ constitute a surreal sense of surreality through scattered perspective, odd-shaped scenes and characters, which are often encyclopedic architectural displays, like sandboxes, or layout drawings; the characters are often watery-eyed dolls, or parodies of strange movies.
At the same time, Kikuchi Hiroki also likes to cut and collage the real person's inch photo, the inch photo means the coincidence and recognition of formal, social identity and natural identity, the reorganization after the destruction of the inch photo, the recombined photo presents the same aesthetic characteristics as Kikuchi Hiroki painting, but also means the author's banter on social order, unrestrained temperament, the use of "ready-made products", Kikuchi Hiroki continued his own interest in surrealist ideas.
Kikuchi Hiroki's works fully exude the meaning of freedom, Kikuchi Hiroki also has the habit of creating painted diaries, these painted diaries have a higher degree of freedom, and the presentation of picture elements is richer and more varied.
On the one hand, these words and images constitute an image from reality, presenting Hiroki Kikuchi after the work;
On the other hand, it also makes people see more experiments, more exploration of form, similar to the creation of handwriting, showing a more comprehensive, kikuchi Hiroki traces of deeper creative thinking.
△ Hiroki Kikuchi's work "headcomic"
Headcomic is a work published in 2010 by Hiroki Kikuchi, and there is a huge amount of information in every picture in the work.
Hiroki Kikuchi further changed the manga storyboard, allowing the storyboard to fully participate in the composition, realizing a sense of space in the manga frame, and there are plausible internal connections between each frame, which are mixed with the elements in the picture to form a sense of rhythm in the manga.
Compared with the linear narrative of his debut, this work is non-linear, multi-line switching, and jumping, kikuchi Hiroki further expands his freedom, is more comfortable in creation, does not stick to narrative, or any kind of established restrictions, tries to add musicality and mixed elements to the manga, and explores more possibilities of manga.