Born in 1983 in Ehime Prefecture, Japan. He once worked as a manga assistant, and later created paintings based on Japanese manga techniques and concepts. He also photographed natural scenery with the theme of the starry sky through mountain climbing. Among the three major comic styles in the world (Japanese comics, European comic strips and American comics), it is a characteristic of Japanese comics (manga) to express the main body in black and white. Japanese comics originated from Katsushika Hokusai's "Hokusai Manga" and were derived from Ukiyo-e. The Japanese comics developed from this inherited the unique line expression and blank aesthetics of Ukiyo-e. The word "Ukiyo" means "the present world" or "the changing world", and Ukiyo-e, as the name suggests, is a painting in which Edo period painters used popular painting techniques to depict the social scene at that time. The Japanese comics derived from this are defined as "Contemporary Ukiyo-E" that depicts the contemporary social scene.
Kunihiro Watanabe defines his work as “modern Ukiyo-e,” with the concept of “pursuing uniquely Japanese expressions of lines and white space through the use of manga techniques that evolved from Ukiyo-e.”
In Japanese manga, there is a theory that connects the movement of the viewer’s gaze with the direction and actions of the characters. In his “JD-girl Series,” this theory is applied through the careful calculation of composition, character orientation, and the angles of gaze.
In his Color Chart series, he adapts the dot patterns of screentones—commonly used in Japanese manga to create mid-tones within black-and-white imagery—to achieve an effect similar to the divisionist brushstrokes employed by Impressionist painters, thereby expressing complex color tones.
This approach represents the crystallization of the Japanese manga philosophy: creating the greatest possible impact through ingenuity within limited conditions.