みどころ ｜ Highlights

From the very beginning of his career, Takashi Murakami has attempted to capture anime and manga characters as an extension of the Nihonga tradition. The 30-meter-long painting A Picture of Lives Wriggling in the Forest at the Deep End of the Universe displayed at the exhibition is his latest variation on 727, an important early work featuring Murakami's original character Mr. DOB riding on a cloud in a manner reminiscent of the Heian period picture scroll Shigisan Engi (Legend of Mt. Shigi). This latest painting, in which the various characters and subjects Murakami has portrayed over the past 20 years are combined in a single plane, could be likened to a "greatest hits" album in which the artist's masterpieces are collected in one place. Traditionally, viewers may try to discern the meaning of a work in its title, but here, in fact, there is no connection between the two. Murakami aims to have viewers imagine the work by reading the title and then find themselves perplexed by the actual painting, or as Murakami himself puts it, "to be stood at the threshold of understanding the work only to then find themselves at a loss." According to Murakami, "to keep an overwhelming distance from reality when viewing work" is an important part of art.

In Murakami's almost psychedelic abstract paintings, one can see a blending of Star Wars-like Hollywood special effects, Japanese and U.S. post-war avant-garde painting, and calligraphy, manifesting around forms from 1980s New Painting and the phantoms from the manga of Mizuki Shigeru.

His ensō paintings, which symbolically represent not only enlightenment, truth and the Buddha-nature, but also the universe in its entirety, originated from Murakami spraying the word "HOLLOW" on a completed painting in a graffiti-like fashion. In his latest addition to this series, Ensō, a Murakami self-portrait gradually fades as the image transitions from right to left. Here, it would seem that Murakami locates in graffiti art and Zen Buddhist ensō paintings a resonance with the artist's attempts to find fundamental freedom through the denial of self and preconception about paintings. By returning in this way to traditional subjects such as transcendence and enlightenment and revisiting classical paintings as well as his own work Murakami is breathing new life into the past and professes to be "extending the life of painting."

Takashi Murakami unveiled his first Daruma (Bodhidharma) paintings in 2007, signaling a new direction in which he would tackle afresh the traditions of Japanese art.

The adjacent work in the exhibiton shows the anecdote, also famously depicted in the ink and wash painting by Sesshu Tōyō, about Taiso Eka (Dazu Huike) cutting off his own arm to prove his resolve to Bodhidharma, who had initially refused to teach him. Murakami focuses on Eka's arm, emphasizing the pictorial composition rather than the anecdotal content.

Located in the center of the gallery is The Birth Cry of a Universe, a sculptural work which Murakami also refers to as a "Daruma" work. It is his latest venture in innovative sculpture, following on Mister Pointy, which was installed in the Mohri Garden at Roppongi Hills in 2005, and Oval Buddha, unveiled at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Representing the reality of our contemporary social structure—with its constant pursuit of development—collapsing under its own weight, it resembles on one hand a monster, while on the other its body, sparkling with gold, is infused with majesty. In arriving at this figure, a giant writhing body with 354 eyes, 105 whiskers and over 1200 teeth, Murakami was conscious of the lineage of "formal deterioration" in sculpture. Thematically linked to our deteriorating world and expressing the unsettled state of the artist's mind, this endless, massive sculpture is still incomplete after having been worked on for over ten years.

Mr. DOB, a cartoon character elevated to the level of contemporary art subject, was born in 1993 with the aim of disjointing the meaning of Japanese "character culture," a subject that had suddenly become the focus of attention at the time. His form drew on elements of a character called Pyonkichi from the manga Dokonjo Gaeru (Gutsy Frog) and the video game character Sonic the Hedgehog, while his name is a contraction of the Romanized spelling of a coinage created through the meaningless combination of comedian Yuri Toru's catchphrase, "oshamanbe," and the line "dobojite dobojite" (Why? Why?) from the manga Inakappe Taishō.

In other words, the name "DOB" itself has no meaning. This thought, which dates back to the title of his doctoral thesis, "Imi no muimi no imi" (The meaning of the nonsense of the meaning), also serves as both the motivation and the very subject of Murakami's artistic practice via his unique brand of nihilism and cynicism. The design of Mr. DOB has been morphing in detail and proliferating ever since, the character becoming an alter ego or self-portrait-like presence that joins/infiltrates diverse contexts and traverses various boundaries.

Tan Tan Bo, in a sense a reincarnation of Mr. DOB as a monster, is based on a manga character created by Mizuki Shigeru, a favorite of Murakami's when he was a boy, in the form of a phantom consisting solely of a giant face spitting out phlegm from its mouth. The complex image of the phantom reflects Murakami's personal anxiety regarding the expanding development of nuclear power. At one extreme of Murakami self-portraits is Gero Tan. Gero Tan, who appears to writhe while vomiting, was born when Murakami conflated the character of Tan Tan Bo with his own wretched sense of cracking under pressure at a time when his career first expanded to the international arena. These paintings employ a complex "cruciform composition" that references the work of Itō Jakuchu and a technique that generates spatial expansiveness through the movement of the viewer's gaze. These elements, in combination with the characters' expressions, aim to create a story within the canvas.

Regarding this work, Takashi Murakami comments: "At the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, faced with a national emergency, the Japanese people experienced a sense of helplessness, yet despite this sense of helplessness people had to continue to live their lives... In order to recover from despair, we needed a narrative that would restore our hope, even if that narrative was a fictional one. Throughout history, religion and legends have offered such narratives, and now those stories are needed again. The Five Hundred Arhats is a story about healing 500 different varieties of human suffering. The balance between life and death was called into question after great natural disasters and the motif of the Five Hundred Arhats suddenly started to seem relevant."

The resulting work here is a massive painting measuring three meters tall and 100 meters wide all together. It comprises four sections, each of which is named after one of the four Taoist gods that reign over the four points of the compass: the Blue Dragon of the east, the White Tiger of the west, the Vermilion Bird of the south, and the Black Tortoise of the north. Grounded by particular focus on the sixteen central arhats, it depicts in a dreamlike, dynamic fashion a total of 500 arhats along with various sacred animals and birds against a background of raging flames and roaring winds. Close inspection reveals the extent to which the individual elements, including the detailed portrayal of characters, the multiple layers of paint, and the lustrous finish of the glitter-covered surface, have been painstakingly incorporated into the work using sophisticated techniques.

The creature that reigns over the north is usually portrayed as a cross between a turtle and a snake, but in Murakami's work the creature itself is not depicted. Instead, the sacred mountain in the center and the sacred animal, Shen, next to it serve as substitutes for images of a turtle and snake, respectively. When it was exhibited in Doha, Qatar in 2012, this section of the painting was incomplete, lacking among other things the fourth giant sacred animal, making this the first exhibition of the completed work anywhere in the world. The Vermilion Bird that reigns over the north incorporates images from Tezuka Osamu's Hinotori (Phoenix) based on early-modern Chinese phoenix designs. Arhats, who float freely in the space-like background, almost appear as if they have visited us riding on gigantic waves for the purposes of spirit pacification.

In this work, for which Murakami and his assistants examined various arhat imagery from the past as part of an effort to create a decidedly modern depiction of the Five Hundred Arhats, traditional Eastern iconography and elements borrowed from contemporary magazines and manga form a harmonious unit.

Some have called it "Murakami's Guernica," referencing Pablo Picasso's masterpiece Guernica, which was painted as a response to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. Confronted with the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and the subsequent nuclear power plant disaster, many artists were seized by a sense of helplessness, while others undertook various activities in response. When a society finds itself in a critical situation, what is it that its artists and art can do? In order to convey a message from the past to the present, and from the present to the future, Murakami has joined forces with young artists to produce the kind of massive painting that will stand the test of time. Indeed, one could say that The 500 Arhats is Takashi Murakami's answer to this question.