Why did Yoshitaka Amano start painting on aluminium?

After setting up a studio in New York in the late 1990s, Amano decided to switch his primary pursuit to fine art. The signature objects of that career are aluminium box panels painted with acrylic and automotive paint: Take Off, his portrait of Gatchaman's leader Ken the Eagle from 2006, stretches more than thirteen feet wide, and the 2018 two-panel Big Bang lies smooth and glossy under clear-coated automotive paint.

The medium is the message. Aluminium does not absorb; colour sits on the surface with a hard shine, a modern echo of the traditional Japanese lacquer craft of Amano's childhood home and of the flat brilliance of ukiyo-e. Presented on cold metal, detached from their stories, his Saturday morning heroes read less like cartoons and more like ritual masks, as his first New York gallery observed when the large paintings filled Leo Koenig's space in 2002.

The gallery career kept building from there: the Deva Loka exhibition opened a new New York gallery space in the autumn of 2018 with entirely new panels, and the retrospective Amano Corpus Animae gathered more than 200 works, from Speed Racer to unpublished new pieces, showing in Milan before moving to the Palazzo Braschi in Rome. Alongside the panels he still exhibits sumi-e, monochrome ink painting in a tradition centuries old.