AC-bu
"GIFTOOOON"

GIFTOOOON, an exhibition by the creative team AC-bu, which has been held to great success at the Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery (Tokyo), OVERGROUND (Fukuoka), and Nekoyacho Building (Hiroshima), will now be held as a traveling exhibition in Osaka. In addition, on April 24th (Thursday) during the exhibition period, a solo live concert by the music unit group_inou, with whom AC-bu has collaborated on music videos and artwork for many years, will be held at Umeda CLUB QUATTRO to liven up the exhibition.

Manga is a form of pop culture that represents Japan. Since its formation in 1999, AC-bu has been expanding the possibilities of manga expression through unique techniques. The team's creations, such as "high-speed kamishibai (paper play)" and "GIF manga," have attracted attention in Japan and abroad for their innovative ideas. Recently, the team has been issuing new challenges to a wide range of readers through the manga "Kyanbare! Rota Momo," which is serialized in Monthly CoroCoro Comic (Shogakukan).

The venue in Osaka, i GALLERY OSAKA, will be exhibiting "Automatic Mangaka," an installation that automatically draws manga, which has become a major topic of conversation on social media platforms. "Automatic Mangaka" is a creation similar to an artificial human, in which images of a face and arms appearing on a monitor are linked to the movements of a mechanical hand holding a pen, as if the artist were drawing while worrying. The exhibition will also feature a wide variety of creations, including the main focus, a video creation produced as a music video for the song "HAPPENING" by the music unit group_inou(see Note 1); a digital comic "GIF Manga" creation that seamlessly connects monochrome animated GIFs; and canvas works painstakingly hand-painted to depict every single grain in grainy images created by image compression and dithering from GIF conversion. Please enjoy the creative expressions of AC-bu as "filmmakers" that have developed through their activities up until now. In addition to the original merchandise created for the exhibition, "Iruka no Iruka-kun" and "AC-bu" merchandise created in the past will also be on sale at the venue.

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Note 1: “HAPPENING”, produced by AC-bu as a Music GIF Manga for the music duo group_inou, is a vertical-format video work that fuses GIF-style manga with music. Released at the end of 2023, it quickly garnered attention from multiple media outlets and was later adapted into the web application Kindolphin in 2024. The app allows free scrolling and scratching, giving viewers access to past GIF Manga works. As of January 2025, it has won four awards both in Japan and internationally.

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-「HAPPENING」 (MV)  Link

-「Kindolphin」 (WEB APP) Link

Video: AC-bu, Interactive Design: Baku Hashimoto, Music: group_inou