What was Inoue Takehiko: The LAST Manga Exhibition?

From 2008 to 2010, Inoue Takehiko: The LAST Manga Exhibition toured Japanese museums including the Ueno Royal Museum. Building on the 10 Days After chalkboards, Inoue treated the museum itself as a page, drawing frames of many sizes directly into the gallery space to tell a Vagabond story ahead of the manga, an approach he called spatial manga.

The exhibition matters to a Slam Dunk shelf for two reasons. It established Inoue's second public identity, the exhibiting artist whose original drawings command museum treatment, which in turn shapes how his books and originals are valued. And its catalogues and goods form a documented print layer of their own, the exhibition book being a standard Japanese collecting category.

Google Arts and Culture's documentation of the show remains a good visual record of the installation for readers who cannot see the surviving materials in person.