KRAZY!

I finally had the chance to go KRAZY! at the Vancouver Art Gallery yesterday. As explained on their site: "Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art is the first exhibition of its kind, a groundbreaking project that offers unique and dynamic insight into the world of comics,animated cartoons, anime, manga, graphic novels, computer/video games and visual art." Rather exciting, you would think?

I met up with Mo2 after work while we waited for Simon and gang to get their late arses there. We chilled at Starbucks until they arrived. We started in the comics section... They use a lot of liquid paper. They had an attempted "interactive" part which was basically you drawing your own comic (eh.)... failed bad. There was this guy artist who drew the life of a really, really depressing woman. I really like his text though. It's so small and yet so precise and clean. Then there was this sad little book area, so you could read... and then that lead to the manga section.

So, the manga section. They featured at 1980's popular guy's comic that was serialized in Shounen Jump way back when. Then there was this other comic who had this funny gag about a horse and turtle by Hitoshi Odajima. There was also FSS, which Sty would've loved but she has everything FSS already anyways. Quite a bit of Tekkonkinkreet was featured there. That Pure Trance series is pretty distrubing. After Manga was of course the Anime. There was this dark area which had film projectors projecting certain shows (Macross, Patlabor, Tekkon, Something no Mukou Yakusoku no Basho)... Then a little corner dedicated to Yoko Kanno. Moving out of the Anime section was Cartoons. I really like Gertie the dinosaur for some strange reason!

Moving upstairs, there was a feedback section which wasn't really clear and it was messy. Then beside it was the Gaming section. There was Super Mario and Zelda that was playable... unfortunately Quake was only shown on the projector. I picked up some pigs in Zelda. Then we found Mo2 hiding in the video room watching Dumbo. After Gaming was just general visual art. After that was the scary Alien-eyed strange girl section called "No Ghost Just Shell" (pun off ghost in the shell perhaps?). She's only cute in her anime drawing form... After making the turn away from the scary girl section, there was a 8-minute China cosplay video. Hilarious and dumb in all sorts of ways. I commend them for their costumes, but the video itself was ridiculous. They built up drama for majority of the video and then they all "die" within 10 seconds. And then the next thing you know, they're alive again living normal lives (in their not-so-normal clothing lol). The most interesting display was the giant pink head display. They expanded this girl's head and filled it with cute stuff. I'm not joking.

I took a quick look at the gift shop. They sold tokidoki stuff (not their bag/clothes line). That's probably the only thing worth mentioning.

Out of curiosity, we visited the upstairs which were other exhibits. Zhang Huan, in particular, had the insanest and most interesting exhibit at the whole gallery.

To break down the visit, it isn't as KRAZY! as its name, with the exclamation mark and all. The exhibit topic was way too general and broad, so it felt like they didn't even touch on much. Now that I think back, I was critiquing my way through the museum (just because of my studies in museum design last semester) and it was true, the setup of the exhibit wasn't all that interesting. But I didn't have high hopes considering the reviews I've heard from many others already before my visit.

I had corn on the cob for dinner that night. It wasn't even sweet.