Character is an extremely rare art book produced in an edition of only 10 copies ( Autographed and handwritten title included / Includes CD ) by Tadanobu Asano, who is both an actor and an artist.

While internationally acclaimed for his work as a film actor, Asano has consistently presented visual works—such as drawings and paintings—since the 1990s. Character is a body of work that strongly reflects this aspect of his practice as a visual artist. It marks a point at which the boundaries between “the figure who performs a role” and “the subject who draws” dissolve. The book stands as the crystallization of Asano’s attempt to move beyond his public image as an actor and to reach toward a more fundamental, anonymous self. At the same time, it quietly questions the nature of the “expressive body” in contemporary Japan.

The title Character refers not only to figures within a narrative, but also to social roles, emotional masks, and alter egos of the self. The images collected here are marked by rough, improvised lines; forms in which childlike innocence and violence coexist; and impulses inscribed prior to language. These images can be read as an accumulation of sensations internalized by Asano through the many roles he has embodied as an actor.

The limitation of just 10 copies positions this work not as a conventional publication, but as an object existing very close to the artist’s private sphere. Distanced from mass distribution and reproducibility, the form itself assigns meaning to the act of possession. In this sense, Character resonates with the lineage of alternative publishing and artist books that has developed in Japan since the 1990s.