Manabu Mabe

Mabe was born into a formerly prosperous family in Japan, where his father owned a ferryboat business and a hotel called the House of Flowers.

"[4] He won the painting prize at the second São Paulo International Biennial (1953), where only two Japanese-Brazilian artists were accepted: Mabe and Tadashi Kaminagai.

[6] In the book Life and Art of the Japanese in Brazil, Cecília França Lourenço describes the use of geometry and abstractionism by Japanese-Brazilian artists as responding to a "vital and cultural impulse, more easily identified with gesture, form, and formal research, thus becoming an inexhaustible source revitalized through experience."

"[8] In 1986, Mabe held a major retrospective exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) and published a catalogue featuring 156 reproductions of his work with text in Portuguese, English, and Japanese.

[9] The influence of Mabe's work, along with that of fellow Japanese-Brazilian artists like Tomie Ohtake and Tikashi Fukushima, was significant in Brazilian art.

[11] In 1995, Mabe published his autobiography Chove no Cafezal (It Rains in the Coffee Plantation) in Japanese, which was initially serialized in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper in his native Kumamoto region.

The National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro houses one of his most significant paintings, "Still Life" (oil on canvas).