Hokusai, celebrated worldwide for Under the Wave off Kanagawa and often regarded as one of the great early masters connected to the history of manga through his Hokusai Manga sketchbooks, came back into my mind in an unexpected way while I was wandering through the Hansabibliothek in Berlin. There, inside that beautiful place to roam, I came across a collection of three volumes by him, and the encounter immediately pulled me into drawing.

I began sketching under the direct spell of his work, letting that energy pass through my own visual language. Some of those drawings have already made their way onto skin, and this piece, The Golden Tiger, is one of them. It is my way of carrying that moment of discovery forward: a meeting between admiration, study, and transformation, where the gesture of looking at a master became the impulse to create something of my own.