The star of Takashi Murakami’s new London show is Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP. At over thirteen meters long and three meters high, the artwork’s source material is a 17th-century mural depiction of daily life in Kyoto. Artist Iwasa Matabei’s faded original sits in the Tokyo National Museum, while Murakami’s updated version gathers contemporary plaudits. As well it should. It’s quite something, the sort of artwork that elicits short gasps of pleasure.
“Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” at Gagosian’s Mayfair branch in London showcases the Japanese polymathic artist in remix mode as he updates important pieces from his country’s artistic past. For Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP, Murakami has added his own anime-inspired, gaudily goofy characters to an ancient landscape already teeming with human activity. Thus, Murakami’s grinning sunflowers and funny little monsters mingle with Kyoto locals in a painterly aerial view of centuries-spanning carnival chaos, all on a ground of gold and platinum leaf. Matabei was a ki (eccentric or fantastical) artist revered for his unconventional, cartoonish style of painting and the perfect foil for Murakami’s own mischief.
If this mixing of high art with modern design sounds a bit disrespectful, it might not help to know that Takashi Murakami has been embracing galloping commerciality from the get-go, and it’s serving him well, thanks very much. He studied nihonga (the Japanese art of incorporating various ancient art techniques in painting) at the Tokyo University of the Arts in the early 1990s and used his learnings to invent Japanese answers to Disneyfied Western pop culture soon after. Mr. DOB, his take on Mickey Mouse, crops up throughout his work, as do his stoned-looking mushrooms, the aforementioned smiley flowers and a whole cavalcade of googly-eyed skulls. He also worked out that collaborations are another key to early success. In 2005, he started working with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton on a logo redesign, and the line of Vuitton/Murakami-designed fashion accessories that followed has just been reissued worldwide with ubiquitous actor and social media maven, Zendaya, as the initiative’s ambassador.
Other collaborations ensued—footwear designs for Crocs and Vans, accessories with Billie Eilish, watches with Casio and album artwork for the likes of A$AP Rocky, canceled rap edgelord Kanye West and others—and the “Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” exhibition is the artist’s opportunity to remind the world that his commitment to nihonga has never gone away. The ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock printing), Manga comic design and anime elements he uses in his projects pop up like critters in a whack-a-mole game or dominate artworks completely. Maiko in Springtime Kyoto turns the traditional painting subject of a maiko (young geisha trainee) into a Manga heroine. Kaikai Kiki Style “Karajishi-zu Byōbu” is a two-panel take on sixteenth-century painter Kanō Eitoku’s Chinese Lions. Murakami’s lions maintain the vitality and power of Eitoku’s original as they leap across the gallery wall. The central creatures in the Flaming Vermillion Bird, Blue Dragon Soars Through the Universe, White Tiger and Family and Black Tortoise and Arhats artworks are based on four guardian gods from the Chinese philosophy that had bled into Japanese tradition in ancient times. The creatures came to represent four municipalities in Kyoto in the eighth century and Murakami’s preening, seething modern-day reimaginings are suitably cosmic.
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Re: “Daigo-Hanami-zu-Byōbu rethinks an anonymous depiction of the last days in the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi painted in the late 1700s. A samurai warrior and feudal lord, Hideyoshi was the inspiration for the character Taikō in the recent award-winning TV series Shōgun, and Murakami embeds his appreciation for the drama in a relatively restrained (for him) view of the warrior and his clan in a cherry blossom garden. There are subtle reminders of Hideyoshi’s warmongering career in the army camouflage textures used to render hills around the garden’s horizon.
All the artworks on view were created by Murakami and his team in 2024, and while the exhibition notes tell that the materials used were acrylic paint and precious metal leaf, closer inspection reveals areas that could only have been generated by software. This is neither a surprise nor a problem. Murakami is open about his use of artificial intelligence in his work, and it would be odd if an artist living on the very edge of the zeitgeist wasn’t getting the best out of the latest image-making technology. Golden Pavilion, for example, includes cookie-cutter variations of the camouflage textures seen in Re: “Daigo-Hanami-zu-Byōbu” and the backgrounds of the other artworks. Resembling a beautiful, highly-finished still from a Studio Ghibli animation, Murakami’s pavilion appears to float on top of its own swirling, watery reflection.
“Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” is art as titivation, with Murakami adding kitsch and cool to fondly remembered glories without weighing the whole thing down with hidden meanings or fancy concepts, historical techniques and references aside. And that’s why being sniffy here would be like telling a kitten off for being cute. If the point of art is, in part, to give pure, unalloyed delight, then Murakami’s new work pulls it off and then some. And, by constantly remixing his kaleidoscope of influences, his output fits neatly into the envied sweet spot between what people like to buy in stores, what they enjoy looking at in public art galleries and what the wealthy can afford to hang at home. It’s just a shame that the Gagosian’s atmosphere feels kind of formal and rarified for art as decorous as this. Dedicating one sober-suited security guard to each piece in the gallery seems excessive, the space’s plain concrete walls look doubly drab behind such vibrant art, and the absence of any kind of merchandise is baffling, given that Murakami is as happy designing keyrings and t-shirts as he is conceiving and completing grand-scale paintings. Perhaps one of London’s bigger art institutions should take glitches like these as a cue to recognize the contribution Takashi Murakami is making to 21st-century culture and grant him the high-definition, no-holds-barred exhibition he deserves.
“Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami” is on view through March 8 at Gagosian in Grosvenor Hill, London.
