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The exhibition This Is Not Fan Art brings together five young artists: Miguel Angel Polick, Vanessa Karin, John Kevin Chávez, Salima Black, and Martín Tokeshi who work across diverse media. Despite their varied approaches, their work is visibly shaped, in different ways, by the visual culture of Japanese manga and anime.

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It is not difficult to observe that anime and manga have become an integral part of our urban landscape, both online and offline: fantastical characters who are half-human and half-animal, romantic and naïve girls, powerful and violent warriors, sophisticated robots, and strange aliens not only populate our screens, but have also long inhabited our imagination—dating back even to pre-internet times.

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Icons such as Mario and Luigi, Donkey Kong, Candy, Goku, and the Dragon Ball characters—along with countless Pokémon and their many evolutions—are clear examples of this. The global reach of Japanese entertainment culture is perhaps most evident in the abundance of fan art—images, comics, and videos created by fans in tribute to their favorite characters, often continuing their adventures unofficially—that circulates widely across all social media platforms.

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However, the five artists in This Is Not Fan Art are not merely channeling admiration for specific anime or manga. Rather, they reinterpret the visual codes, narrative devices, and genres intrinsic to these mediums. Their work speaks from the specificity of their own lived experiences—how they inhabit the world and relate to one another—while actively incorporating elements of what has become a global lingua franca for youth: contemporary Japanese visual culture.

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As such, these works testify to the deep impact of these cultural forms within our local context. More importantly, they reveal how a generation of post-internet artists experiences the world—an experience deeply mediated by personal screens.

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One could argue that the works in this exhibition offer a way to process some of the dominant conditions of our time: the overwhelming visual information constantly bombarding us through all kinds of screens, and the nature of that information—excessive, dissonant, instantaneous, ephemeral, and viral.

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In other words, this group of artists engages with the ways in which the boundaries between online and offline life have blurred to the point of near indistinction.