ART CITIES: London-Takashi Murakami

Drawing from traditional Japanese painting, sci-fi, anime, and the global art market, Takashi Murakami creates paintings, sculptures, and films populated by repeated motifs and mutating characters of his own creation. His wide-ranging work embodies an intersection of pop culture, history, and fine art. Since the early 1990s Murakami has invented characters that combine aspects of popular cartoons from Japan, Europe, and the US—from his first Mr. DOB, who sometimes serves as a stand-in for the artist himself, to various anime characters and smiling flowers, bears, and lions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

In his solo exhibition “Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami”, the artist pursues his fascination with the narrative of Japanese art by offering his own interpretations of historical paintings. By “Murakamizing” these iconic images, he ponders the erosion of the nation’s ancient splendor; he also considers the ways in which it has been impacted by new aesthetics and values associated with its opening to the West after the end of the Edo period (1603–1868). “Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP” (2023–24) is modelled on Iwasa Matabei’s “Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu Funaki Version)” from the collection of the Tokyo National Museum. The original seventeenth-century work depicts the city in extraordinary detail across two six-panel folding screens. Murakami’s version, which was commissioned for his exhibition at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, populates its gold-leaf clouds with skulls, a memento mori inspired by a visit to the Toribeno burial ground. He also integrates examples of his own iconography including smiling flower-faced figures and his familiar Mr. DOB character.  Murakami’s paintings of the Four Symbols, mythical guardians of Kyoto, pair each of their subjects with metropolitan locations aligned with the four compass directions: the Black Tortoise is associated with Mount Funaoka and Mount Kitayama in the north of the city; the Blue Dragon with the Kamo River in the east; the Vermilion Bird with Ogura Pond in the south; and the White Tiger with the San’indo Highway in the west. To arrive at these juxtapositions, Murakami combined his own sketches with AI-generated images and fragments of his earlier works in a process that parallels the inventiveness of earlier artists in depicting unfamiliar or imaginary creatures. Another diptych pictures the gods of wind and thunder in the blend of classical Japanese painting techniques with Pop, anime, and otaku graphics that Murakami terms “Superflat.” This paired depiction employs the same motifs and composition that Tawaraya Sōtatsu (dates unknown), Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), and Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1828) each revisited roughly a century apart. At the same time, it allows viewers to observe the development of the Kyoto-based Rinpa school. In the premodern artists’ paintings, the subjects are depicted as Buddhist deities or attendants; today, they sometimes even appear on commercial packaging in the form of cartoonlike icons, a transformation reflected in Murakami’s treatment. Among the other works in the exhibition are figure and flower paintings, including a tondo. In one, Murakami reworks a set of Daigo Hanami-zu screens from the collection of the National Museum of Japanese History in Sakura that depicts a cherry blossom viewing event on the grounds of Kyoto’s Daigoji Temple; in another, he reinterprets a pair of Kiku-zu screens by Kōrin that portray chrysanthemums in white, green, black, and gold. A version of an additional screen by the same artist features bunches of hollyhocks in red, pink, and white, while a work inspired by a screen from the collection of the Artizon Museum, Tokyo, reproduces a composition of hollyhocks and peacocks. The tondo features aqueous patterns, or “Kōrin Water,” and repeating chrysanthemums, motifs developed by Kōrin that sometimes also appear on kimono fabric. In this bridging of art and fashion, Kōrin, who was the son of a kimono merchant, could be considered Murakami’s creative forerunner.

Photo: Takashi Murakami, Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP, 2023–24, Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel, in 2 parts, Overall: 9 feet 10 ⅛ inches × 42 feet 10 ⅞ inches (3 × 13.1 m), © 2023-2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved, Photo: Kei Okano, Courtesy Gagosian

Info: Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 10/12/2024-8/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/