It’s Kyoto, but not as you know it. Forget cherry blossom and golden temples: study one of Takashi Murakami’s vast new paintings and you’ll notice shimmering clouds laid over the embossed outlines of cartoon skulls. It’s a reference, he says, to the city’s ancient Toribeno burial ground – and a key motif for the artist in his evocation of Japan’s postwar ghosts.
“I really wanted to depict a version of Kyoto that is not beautiful or pleasing to tourists,” says Murakami via a translator from his vast studio-cum-factory complex outside Tokyo. “I wanted to show that Kyoto’s arts and culture were nurtured within the context of really gruesome historical and political conflicts.”
Why did the 62-year-old want to explore his country’s brutal history? Part of the reason lies in his most recent obsession: the 10-part TV series Shōgun. The rapturously received tale of warring factions and European meddling in 17th-century feudal Japan was a major influence for Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami, his new show at London’s Gagosian gallery.
“[Shōgun was] done from a viewpoint that was very refreshing for the Japanese,” says Murakami. “For example, with the hara-kiri scenes, they really connected with the political and spiritual motivations. The fact they all have their own poem before they kill themselves – a contemporary Japanese director would not put that in. So I realised there are these old themes and stories that can be approached from a really fresh angle.”
Murakami has been trying to find fresh angles on old themes for the last three decades. Born in Tokyo in 1962, he switched from studying animation to classical Japanese painting while at Tokyo University of the Arts, before a fellowship in 1994 led him to MoMA PS1’s year-long international studio program. While in New York, Murakami marvelled at the monumentalism of Anselm Kiefer and the sleek simulacrums of Jeff Koons. Seeking to adopt the rules of the western art market, he launched his own pioneering investigation of Japanese art history.
With his Superflat manifesto, published in 2000, Murakami denounced hierarchical constructs of “high” and “low” art as a western import, steamrolling conceptual barriers between revered historical masterpieces and contemporary anime by celebrating their shared aesthetic genealogy.
It brought the artist staggering global success. His cover art for Kanye West’s 2007 album, Graduation, sparked a series of musical collaborations that include Drake, A$AP Rocky and, more recently, Billie Eilish and the late rapper Juice Wrld. Murakami’s mastery of branding obliterated the distinction between fine art and consumer goods, while his embrace of new technologies – not to mention his wacky taste in headgear – ensured continued popularity among younger, online audiences.
In 2002, his pictures first covered Louis Vuitton handbags in a wildly successful collaboration with the French luxury brand that has just been extended – he also works with Supreme, Uniqlo and Crocs. And yet, as one of Japan’s most recognised contemporary artists, Murakami receives most attention abroad. His major solo exhibition at Kyoto’s Kyocera Museum of Art earlier this year was his first in Japan for nearly a decade.
Many of the works at Gagosian have travelled directly from Kyocera, a show in which Murakami provided his own take on some of Japan’s most cherished Edo masterpieces. Chief among them is a designated national treasure: Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu (Scenes In and Around Kyoto, c1615), an exquisitely detailed aerial view of everyday life in newly urbanised Kyoto, originally painted across two, six-panel folding screens by 17th-century painter, Iwasa Matabei.
Murakami’s ambitious response appears to be a mere replica at first, but on closer inspection several of Murakami’s relentlessly serialised zany mascots distinguish it from the original, with the most significant alteration seen in the gold-leaf mist that drifts across the diptych, framing individual scenes as miniature vignettes. Murakami rarely operates in half measures, and this work stretches over 13 metres, almost four times the size of Matabei’s original. It’s here that you’ll find the aforementioned skulls that remind us of Kyoto’s less beautiful past.
This capacity to internalise trauma is a key part of Japan’s otaku subculture. Translated as “your home”, otaku refers to obsessive homebody fans of anime, manga and video games in which a paradoxical proliferation of cuteness (kawaii) and apocalypse embody the simultaneous need to escape and confront postwar trauma. Considered indigenous to Japan, otaku nonetheless has its origins in American cultural imperialism during their occupation of the country.
Crucially for Murakami – a once aspiring animator who remains an avid collector of the genre – otaku’s two-dimensional planar perspective provides a link to the Edo painters. Using his recurring alter ego Mr DOB, a chimerical fusion of Sonic the Hedgehog and manga character Doraemon, Murakami inserts otaku alongside its aesthetic forebear, flattening three centuries of Japanese art into a single plane (hence the name Superflat).
Much of Murakami’s thinking here stems from the influence of renowned Japanese art historian and Edo expert Nobuo Tsuji, who he refers to as “sensei”. With his seminal 1970 book, Lineage of Eccentrics: Matabei to Kuniyoshi, Tsuji was first to expound a shared lineage connecting Edo painters with contemporary animators. Between 2009 and 2011, Tsuji and Murakami honoured the aristocratic Japanese pastime of e-awase (painting contest), with Tsuji challenging Murakami with a historical Japanese work for him to respond to.
At Gagosian, Murakami mimics that call and response with his renditions of Wind God and Thunder God (both 2023/24), timeless motifs previously painted on to folding screens by canonised members of Japan’s 17th century Rinpa school: Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Ogata Kōrin and Sakai Hōitsu.
“When the Wind and Thunder God were painted, during Japan’s warring states period, the Chinese artistic mode of exaggerated bodies and muscles had just arrived in Japan,” says Murakami. “Painting this now, I had to think about current aesthetic trends and I thought of the yuru-kyara, the cute mascots that are ubiquitous in Japan, because it is a very peculiar aspect of Japanese culture to adore and cherish those characters.”
Acknowledging the infantilising effects of kawaii culture and Japan’s postwar subservience to America, Murakami’s benign and rather puny iterations of each deity are a far cry from their brawny antecedents. In his use of gold, though, which abounds across the exhibition, the work offers a firm nod to Rinpa tradition. “When you use gold leaf on the surface of the painting, it sort of shuts down the pictorial space,” says Murakami. “When you depict characters on that backdrop, they stand out, so the balance is really difficult to strike. The Rinpa painters were always thinking about that relationship between the gold leaf background and the character.”
In the eyes of Murakami, the magic of these compressive compositional techniques has survived through the work of legendary Japanese animators such as Yoshinori Kanada, Katsuhiro Otomo and Hayao Miyazaki. Not only do they emulate the eccentric and unconventional styles of the Rinpa school and other Edo painters, their propensity for playful, expressionistic distortions of human and animal forms reflects a distinctly Japanese sensibility, evident as far back as 12th century Heian illustrated picture scrolls. For Murakami, who never considered himself a skilled draughtsman despite obtaining a PhD in classical Japanese Nihonga painting, these irreverent nonconformists are embraced as kindred spirits.
“I’ve been thinking about how Rinpa artists had their own textbooks and guidelines in terms of how to paint these works, which they would study and learn from,” he says. “But even so, each artist had their own quirks and characteristics that set them apart, and that’s how they were actually understood and respected.”
Six years have passed since Murakami’s last Gagosian London show, a joint venture with Virgil Abloh, the former artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear, and a fellow free-spirited trailblazer who died in 2021. I interviewed Abloh at the time of the exhibition and he described his collaborator as “the only person in the world who works harder than me”. At 62, is the artist thinking about slowing down? “Maybe I already am,” he says. “I’m working on more projects, so there’s an increasing number of works under way. But actually, I’m sleeping better than ever.”
