Haida manga takes centre stage in Vancouver

When Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas first got the call that his artwork had been selected to adorn a Canadian stamp, he was elated.

“I was like ‘Oh hey, I gotta tell everybody,’” he recalls. “I felt pretty good about it, because it is like cultural currency, a stamp.”

But he soon learned that the news was embargoed until it was officially released, so he would have to keep it to himself for a couple of years. On November 20, his stamp was finally unveiled by Canada Post, along with those of five other Canadian graphic artists.

Based on his 2009 graphic novel Red: A Haida Manga, which tells the story of two orphaned siblings, it references a classic Haida story from his family. The book actually started out as Red, a 6.5-square-metre mural that is now part of the permanent collection in Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology. 

Both the stamp and book feature Yahgulanaas’s signature style, which blends together Haida storytelling with Asian brush techniques learned under the mentorship of Cantonese master Cai Ben Kwon. 

The stamp is the latest in several significant developments in Yahgulanaas’s artistic career. Clan Hat, a major mural piece commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery three years ago, is now on display for the first time in the gallery’s current exhibition, We who have known tides, which opened November 6. 

To get to the exhibit, visitors must move through the vivid stripes of artist Jim Lambie’s psychedelic installation in the gallery’s rotunda up the stairs to the second floor, where they’re greeted by Clan Hat as the show opener.

A massive four-by-two-metre mural made up of 108 watercolour and ink paintings on handmade Japanese mulberry paper, it takes up most of the wall. Like Red, the mural is done in a high-level manga style and tells the story of a community that lives in a clan hat-shaped structure on a pillar in the middle of the ocean that reaches to the middle of the sky.  

Instead of the typical white gutters seen in comic books, the panels in Yahgulanaas’s piece are separated by swirling black formline shapes that come together as a larger image when viewed from farther away.

“When you get close to it, you can see individual story elements, but when you're back, it's this wall of swirling shapes and you can see the black frame line, and you can sort of see something is going on. The idea behind that is the individual story that's locked inside a frame, just like in a comic book—the frame is connected to the entire story in a huge way. It’s about inclusivity,” he explains. “Things that seem to be happening separately from us, but they're actually connected anyways. There's sort of a Haida sense of cosmology there.”

When creating the murals, which takes years, Yahgulanaas starts with the frame line or what he calls “the black line” and then works the story into it.

“The scale is really difficult. I have a small studio, and if I want to look at the bigger picture, often I find myself having to go outside and peer through the window,” he says.

That large-scale part is like looking through a telescope. Each section is then made by looking at about 10 to 20 pages at a time, which he likens to using “binoculars,” and then painting each page is more like working through a microscope. “It's kind of this push-pull of perspective all the time,” he says. 

We who have known tides marks Curator Dr. Camille Georgeson-Usher’s first exhibition as Vancouver Art Gallery’s newly appointed Audain Senior Curatorial Advisor on Indigenous Art. She says Clan Hat was selected to open the show because she felt it could meet the intense energy of the installation in the staircase as viewers entered. 

“It’s so iconic, it just fits perfectly,” she says. “I love that his work, on face value, is this beautiful, fun energetic piece, but then he’s also speaking to how this adventurer is trying to sustain their community and how they are facing these external forces that don’t want them to be sustained. It’s a kind of metaphor for colonialism, the colonialists don’t want Indigenous communities to be strong and self-resilient.”

The show came together in just six months, and much of the nearly 40 works by Indigenous artists, which span the 1960s to today, draw on the gallery’s existing collection. Coincidentally, the theme of Clan Hat—finished just months before the show’s opening—fit precisely with the concept Georgeson-Usher already had for the show, which is a poetic reflection on the Pacific Ocean and what it means to be both inspired by and in relationship with it. 

“It just so happened to be the perfect storm that this incredible new work that Michael just made, we just had enough time to frame it and get it in the show,” she says. “The way that I curate, and the way that I write and how I create, is that I want all my work to be read from a joyful, feminist, queer lens that is very playful, yet political. His work is just so good, he’s very good at that.”

As a world-renowned artist with works on permanent display at The British Museum, the Humboldt Forum Foundation in Berlin (JAJ, another Haida manga mural) and at The Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris, which recently purchased nine works in Yahgulanaas’s Daalkaatlii Diaries series for their permanent collection, it’s remarkable Yahgulanaas became a full time artist later in his life.

Though his interest in visual art started early, he spent decades in politics as an environmental advocate, both as an elected Chief councillor and with the Council of the Haida Nation. He even makes a brief appearance as one of the organizers in the National Film Board’s documentary The Stand, about the Haida people’s blockade of a logging road in 1985. 

However, after years of doodling caricatures during meetings, he realized he couldn’t do political service for the rest of his life, because he didn’t want to end up “a really bitter old man.” So he decided to make art his profession.

In the end, his art has also become a space to explore politics, just in a different way. With a Haida grandfather and a Canadian grandfather of Norwegian descent, the concept of bridging cultures quickly emerged as a central theme within his work. 

“As I grew into adulthood, I realized I don't have to make a choice between, ‘Am I Indigenous or am I Canadian?’ I don't have to pick one good guy and make the other a bad guy. I can have both,” says Yahgulanaas, who divides his time between his home in Vancouver and in the village of Masset on the northern tip of Haida Gwaii. 

“That's really been the driving force behind Haida manga, was how to take the complexity — like the mural, how it speaks to different cosmologies and worldviews. It's, ‘How do I take that and share it across the cultural divide?’”