Highlights | Takashi Murakami: The 500 Arhats

Highlights

727, Ensō (circle) and Abstraction | Daruma | Mr. DOB | The 500 Arhats – "Blue Dragon" and "White Tiger" | The 500 Arhats – "Black Tortoise" and "Vermilion Bird"

727, Ensō (circle) and Abstraction

"Ensō" series 2015
Installation view: "Takashi Murakami: The 500 Arhats," Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015 Photo: Takayama Kozo
(C)2015 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

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."

727, Ensō (circle) and Abstraction | Daruma | Mr. DOB | The 500 Arhats – "Blue Dragon" and "White Tiger" | The 500 Arhats – "Black Tortoise" and "Vermilion Bird"

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