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Hiyaku Studio is a group of young, local artists who specialize in manga inspired works. Most of the members are situated in New Zealand, however a few of us have left the land of the kiwi to pursue studies and/or career opportunities elsewhere (while remaining active in our current projects).

So what we do is, each year, we hold a project where all of us collaborate to create a series of artworks that will be presented in book form. This artbook is then shown and sold at the annual pop-culture event, Overload. That’s not to say we’re only limited to books, however. We also sell prints, posters, bookmarks and such like. What we bring to Overload often depends on the members’ availability to work on these things.

There is no one true leader in this group; projects are divided so that the person who comes up with an idea (that we all agree on) is in charge of seeing it materialized. In the case of the artbook, the person assigned to construct it is in charge of the form, but the theme is a 100% collaboration effort where everyone presents and edits ideas until we come up with a concept that every member is satisfied with.

It’s important to note that the idea of this undertaking is not for profit; rather, this is about doing what we love to do. It’s fun to work within a group of like-minded individuals to achieve a common goal; and the support we receive from our followers is a welcomed bonus. Inspiration can be severely lacking for many aspiring artists such as ourselves, so seeing this kind of support is very encouraging for us to fit some time into our busy schedules to create free-roaming works like this.

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Hiyaku Studio started with four members in 2006 (when the circle was founded), but we’ve since seen four new members over the years. The list of current members is as follows:

Des Young | Simon Kao (Ethird) | Jeremy Yen (Jeri) | Cody Len (Kody) | Claire Chin | Steven Lin | Allan Xia | Lisa.