In Ore’s world, nobody stands still. His characters lean forward, mid-motion, jackets half-off, eyes unreadable, like they’re about to leave the frame and take the story with them. That tension, that flicker of something unsaid, is where Berlin-born artist Ore (aka Ole Paland) thrives.

Raised in Berlin but creatively reborn in Tokyo, Ore’s work exists in the negative space between manga, fashion, and underground culture. His lines are loose, but intentional while his characters wear their attitude like armor. It’s a deceptively generous form of storytelling as the result of Ore’s drawings offer questions instead of answers.

“I'm trying to create characters that make you wanna look at them and wonder who they are,” he says. “Characters that make you want to fill in the blanks and build the world around them.”

Like many of his generation, Ore’s gateway into art was the manga shelf. But unlike many, he didn’t gravitate toward the polished icons of global anime. His compass pointed to the fringes of artists like Taiyo Matsumoto and Masaaki Yuasa, who proved that distortion can be a kind of clarity. That roughness can feel more real than refinement.

Their influence is visible. Ore’s characters, like Matsumoto’s, stretch, twitch, and emote. There’s a punk sensibility not just in their outfits but in their construction, which feels loose, expressive, sometimes intentionally off. Like they were drawn mid-breath.

More recently, Ore has been diving into the kinetic chaos of Hiroyuki Imaishi and the soft, contemplative worlds of Girls’ Last Tour creator Tsukumizu. It shows. His latest works stretch between energetic and introspective.

Tokyo - Not Just a Backdrop

Ore spent the last years embedded in Tokyo, where his surroundings also became influences. Tokyo unspooled his work. The city’s pace, its visual density, its contradictions, all fed directly into the kind of visual worldbuilding Ore loves: fragmented, expressive, and open-ended.

“Being surrounded by the cultures and environments I’ve been a huge fan of since forever almost forced me to put the pen down more often,” he says. “To slow down and take it all in.”

Even running the Tokyo marathon became source material. So did the everyday act of grabbing something random from the konbini. It’s not inspiration in the romantic sense, it’s daily absorption.

OREMOB - Making Community Wearable

Now back in Berlin, Ore is channeling all of that into OREMOB: part art label, part archive, part community. The project includes hand-printed zines, wearable illustrations, and drops that feel more like cultural signals than product launches.

Take the Bone Dragon, a sneaker collaboration with Flowers for Society. On the surface, it’s streetwear. But under the hood, it’s a world-building object, one tied to Ore’s illustrated universe and supported by digital art, lore, and limited-run physical pieces. Think manga character meets fashion collab, filtered through late-’90s energy.

Ore doesn’t draw clean narratives. He draws the kind of characters you’d follow without knowing why. Characters with loose laces and half-formed backstories, born somewhere between Berlin and Tokyo, stitched together by manga, claw machines, and punk heart. You don’t need to know the full story. You just need to keep looking.

Text by Gill Princen