ART: Shintaro Kago (駕籠 真太郎) - Funny Girls

Shintaro Kago (駕籠 真太郎)
Funny Girls or Brutality thy name is Man
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Original 'Funny Girl' drawings for sale @ Akatako.net

HAIKU Art Review: Shintaro Kago (駕籠 真太郎)

Schoolgirls dissected

Endless self mutilations

Brutal vanity

   Self-proclaimed 'bizarre manga artist' Shintaro Kago (駕籠 真太郎)'s 'Funny Girl' series. He has been drawing grotesque portraits of mostly young schoolgirls for about a decade. He also does commissions for fans, dissecting or mutilating them on paper, as they desire.

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   This is an example of the custom portraits Shintaro will do for fans,

   Shintaro Kago (駕籠 真太郎) at a comic convention (Photo source ??)

    Here's a VICE video of Shintaro doing one of his special portraits for photographer Keiichi Nitta in a cafe.

   I find Shintaro's manga very complex & clever. He approaches his 'guro' stories from an Absurdist, self-aware perspective. His work often deals with the very structure of the comic book layout & the fact that you, the reader have a book in your hands.

   These 'Funny Girls' are more just for fun, however they do speak to the way girls feel about themselves, especially their bodies or more precisely, how a man thinks girls view their bodies.

   There is always the element of duality, pulling apart, tearing away, coming out of an inner conflict manifesting in a violent doppelganger.

   At the same time, I feel bad for liking these images because they seem to be glorifying violence & torture of young women the way 80s direct to video did. Without a moral, the art revels in gruesome depictions of graphic violence against women, almost exclusively.

   Kago tries to balance the violent, misogynistic tone with quirky, absurd humor & the lack of an antagonist. There is no one victimizing these girls (except for the artist creating these pictures), it is usually some kind of self-mutilation.

  "I believe that it’s the viewer who decides whether your work is art or if you’re an artist, not the creator."

    - Shintaro Kago interviewed by Tomokazu Kosuga for VICE 

   "If you’re 100 percent free then I feel that it hinders creative expression in a weird way. Your expressive range becomes richer when you have certain boundaries and restrictions."

     - Shintaro Kago interviewed by Tomokazu Kosuga for VICE 

   "The sex scenes take up a lot of space too, so they’re handy when you’re running low on ideas. I often insert meaningless sex scenes in the middle of a story when I have to fill up a few pages and can’t think of anything else."

  - Shintaro Kago interviewed by Tomokazu Kosuga for VICE

   "My parents died when I was one, and the first time I stole I was five years old. I lost my virginity at six and was briefly into bestiality but got over it when I was around seven. Horses were the toughest, man. They’re so damn big."

   This is one perplexing quote. At first, it's so shocking you want to pass it off a as a joke. He's just messing with the interviewer. But is that the veil? Use the blunt truth as smoke screen.

   Surely, he threw in the line about the horse to discredit the entire story... hmm.

Original 'Funny Girl' drawings for sale @ Akatako.net

Shintaro Kago (駕籠 真太郎)

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Shintaro Kago (駕籠 真太郎) Manga

Dementia 21 - Manga in English (digital download)

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