biscuit gallery Dude, your handwriting is messy
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
AHMED MANNAN Solo Exhibition
“Dude, your handwriting is messy”
BISCUIT GALLERY, TOKYO / SOLO EXHIBITION
Dude, your handwriting is messy
AHMED MANNAN
2026.10.17 [Sat] – 11.1 [Sun]
In October 2026, biscuit gallery will present the solo exhibition “Dude, your handwriting is messy” by AHMED MANNAN. MANNAN has previously taken part in our group exhibitions “grid” in 2022 and “doors” in 2025. This is his first solo exhibition at the gallery.
AHMED MANNAN was born in Osaka in 2000 and completed his graduate studies at the Second Laboratory of Oil Painting Techniques and Materials, Tokyo University of the Arts. He works with canvas, fabric, and everyday materials he has used in the past as his supports, shaping those supports by methods of his own so that his own physicality is layered into the painting.
About “Dude, your handwriting is messy”
The title of this exhibition is a phrase that has been thrown at the artist countless times. Its starting point lies in nineteen years of being told, ever since he first learned to write at elementary school, that his handwriting is messy.
However misshapen the letters may be, among people who use the same language they have always been recognised as a text and received as one. The string of characters is shared regardless, straight through the messiness. That is how MANNAN puts it.
So what about painting? The surface information can be read off one piece at a time, colours and motifs, but whether it is read as a sequence is left to the viewer, and it never becomes anything like a string of characters whose content everyone can share. As a painter, he continues, paintings are not read as eagerly as text.
A blackboard made by the artist himself, together with a ready-made school desk, will be brought into the gallery. The exhibition space takes on the memory of a place where writing is taught, and the paintings are hung within it. For MANNAN, who has painted while shaping his own supports, taking his bodily roots and the wavering of his self-identity as his theme, writing itself lies on that same continuum.
Artist Statement
Nineteen years since I started learning to write in the first grade of elementary school; seventeen years since I first began to suspect that my own handwriting might be bad.
People told me so and I gradually became conscious of it, but apparently my handwriting is messy. It is not as though I dislike writing, and until somebody really let me have it about it, I did not even think my handwriting was all that bad.
Though now that I think about it, I still remember vividly bawling my eyes out over the New Year’s calligraphy homework I did at my grandfather’s house in the third or fourth grade, and the time in my second year of junior high when my club advisor bought me a penmanship book out of his own pocket because my writing was so bad (I gave it up after about five days). I have also gradually remembered how, even when I was writing worksheets and essays as hard as I possibly could, a single blow from my mother — write it more neatly — would have me reaching for the eraser over and over again.
At this point I have not the slightest ambition to write beautifully, but people who can write in a neat block hand, or people with round bubbly letters, look a little enviable to someone whose own writing is so thoroughly AHMED-typeface. That is how completely I have been made to recognise, from compulsory education right through to the present, that my handwriting is bad. And yet, strangely, when it comes to the act of writing something in order to get it across, even when I was told my handwriting was messy, as far as my experience goes nobody has ever given up on reading it altogether (I think). Among people who share the same language, however warped the written letters may be, it can still be recognised as a text and taken in. In other words, I think it can be read straight through the messiness and decoded as a shareable string of characters.
If I bring handwriting alongside painting and think about it: with a painting too, if you are only reading off each piece of surface information on it separately, the colours and the motifs, you might manage it as smoothly as reading a single character. But no matter how concretely it is painted, whether it can be recognised and read as a sequence, the way a sentence is, depends a great deal on the person receiving it. As a painter I think this: paintings are not read as eagerly as writing. Representational or abstract, unskilled or skilled, you will not be able to read straight through it and decode it as a string of characters whose content everyone can share.
So, given that a painting too, however it is made, carries that same impenetrable difficulty and unshareability, then whether people who share a language write neatly or messily, it will be understood and shared as characters and sentences anyway. Leave the standard of “messiness” alone and write in your own typeface.
While writing all this, I looked up the elementary school curriculum guidelines currently in use, announced in 2017, for the first and second grades, and found the following written about penmanship:
(a) To write with correct posture and a correct grip on the writing implement.
(b) To write carefully, following the stroke order, while paying attention to how the strokes are written and to the shape of the character.
(c) To write characters correctly, paying attention to how strokes meet and cross one another, and to their length and direction.
How many people write while keeping to every one of these? Honestly, I do not think the functionality of writing is affected all that much by how beautiful it is. The baptism in penmanship I was doused with is nothing more than a set of virtuous values and manners.
Speaking only of language and writing in general, the forceful and prescriptive “write correctly” and “write the correct thing” are not necessarily things that ought to be pushed forward, and we should be the ones who understand that best. Writing was built into modern school education in Japan in 1872, and through the Meiji era the concept of a “national language” was institutionalised and standardised; under the colonial rule that followed, up to 1945, it was taught not merely to people who might write it correctly, but to people who had no need to share that writing or that language at all. Seen in that light, the very idea of “writing correctly” has an infrastructural side, of course, but it also had a side in which making people acquire correct writing and language enforced a sharing that was excessive and coercive. With all of that in mind, precisely because the type in the textbook you were handed is not the only writing there is, it matters to understand that you have your own typeface.
In short, there are people writing their hearts out, people being taught, people made to write against their will, and people who simply have to write. There can be all sorts of typefaces, and even if writing has “messiness” and “beauty” to it, that has little effect on writing as a function. If anything, I feel there are far fewer people who would answer “yes” when asked, “your handwriting is beautiful, isn’t it?”
I am twenty-six now, so I will go on through life as a man who writes badly, Mr. Messy Hand.
2026 AHMED MANNAN
Artist
AHMED MANNAN
b. 2000, Osaka
Born in Osaka in 2000. Graduated from the Oil Painting Major, Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts in 2024, and completed the Second Studio of Oil Painting Techniques and Materials at the university’s Graduate School of Fine Arts in 2026. Scholar of the KUMA Foundation. Selected solo exhibitions include “여 어데고, 거 언젠데? 니 누꼬!” (Gallery MEME, Seoul, 2024) and “My Favorite Food” (MATTER, Tokyo, 2022). Group exhibitions include “doors” (biscuit gallery, 2025), “grid” (biscuit gallery, 2022) and “COPE” (No Gallery, New York, 2022).
He makes his work using canvas, fabric, and everyday materials he has used in the past as supports. Drawing on his own bodily roots and the wavering of his self-identity, he shapes those supports by methods of his own and fits his own physicality into that painterly expression.
Opening Reception
An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Saturday 17 October 2026, the first day of the exhibition, from 17:00 to 20:00. The artist will be present. No reservation is required, so please feel free to drop by.
INFORMATION
ExhibitionAHMED MANNAN Solo Exhibition “Dude, your handwriting is messy” (お前バリ字きたないやん)
DatesSaturday 17 October – Sunday 1 November 2026
HoursThursday–Sunday 13:00 – 19:00 (closed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday)
Opening ReceptionSaturday 17 October 2026, 17:00 – 20:00
Venuebiscuit gallery (Shinjuku, Tokyo)
AddressMatsui Building 8F, 3-32-10 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0022, Japan
AdmissionFree
Contactinfo@biscuitgallery.com
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