Back to the Future:

Takashi Murakami’s Kyoto Paintings

In 2022, I curated an exhibition of Takashi Murakami’s work at the Broad in Los Angeles that took as its inspiration his monumental, eighty-two-feet-wide In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2014). The culmination of a body of work made in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear-power-plant disaster, the painting features imagery taken from the eighteenth-century artists christened “eccentrics” by Murakami’s mentor, the art historian Nobuo Tsuji—notably, motifs from Soga Shōhaku’s Gunsenzu (Immortals, 1764) and The Daoist Immortal Liu Haichan (Xia Ma, Gama) (c. 1770), and from Itō Jakuchū’s Whale Screen (1797). I made the argument in the exhibition that In the Land of the Dead revealed an ongoing emphasis in Murakami’s work on responding to disasters, a theme legible in his early work’s navigation of the wreckage and energies of post–World War II Japan, in this painting responding to 2011, and in later work addressing the covid-19 pandemic, including NFTs, augmented-reality projects, and a new series of paintings, Unfamiliar People.

While the covid-related works spoke directly to a global crisis, Murakami’s exhibition Mononoke Kyoto, at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art in 2024, seemed to focus instead on the artist’s strategy of making work in conversation with historical Japanese art in and of itself. The occasion for the exhibition was an invitation from Shinya Takahashi, general manager of the museum’s project management office, to stage an exhibition in dialogue with the history of Kyoto. Murakami ambitiously followed that direction, not only presenting recently produced copies of some of the best-known works of his own career but also taking up Kyoto’s Rinpa and Kano schools to engage with works by Ogata Kōrin, Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Ogata Kenzan, and others. The show opened with an extraordinary statement: Murakami’s version of Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto), a pair of screens by Iwasa Matabei from c. 1615. Matabei’s diptych was but one example of Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu, a painting genre spanning from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century; capturing the looks and energies of the city of Kyoto, these works are known for their intricate documentation of the everyday life and rituals of the city.

Sweeping across twenty feet of the entrance gallery, Murakami’s Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu echoed Matabei’s similarly scaled bird’s-eye view of Kyoto from Nijō Castle to the Hōkoku Shrine—around thirty miles as the crow flies, a scene that one would have to climb up into Kyoto’s famous surrounding mountains to see. Having converted the 2,500 people depicted by Matabei into his own, signature graphic-line work and color, Murakami added to them his own, instantly recognizable flower people, now giants, transported back in time and walking through the scene. Using AI, he was able to fill in and augment spaces that in the original paintings were particularly hard to see and re-create. He went on to saturate Matabei’s gold leaf (a feature of both Rinpa- and Kano-school paintings) with skulls built up out of paint. The preliminary sketch for the painting alone took eight months of work.

Murakami’s Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu both is and is not a copy. In that it started as an ultra-high-resolution image of the original, and that in size and spirit it exudes the original’s presence and ethic, Murakami’s diptych is a copy. In that it has been converted for present viewers through Murakami’s hard-earned style, and that it is populated with contemporary characters, the paintings are not copies. The key conundrum and provocation of the work might in fact be the line between a copy and original, in that this line matters differently in the West and in Japan, where a copy can be equal to, stand in for, and replace an original without incident and without any ethical or taste-induced concerns. A copy has long been a way of both praising and affirming the past as well as breaking from it, making the past one’s own. It can be a conjuring, a renewal, or even a refusal.

As both the Kyoto exhibition and my conversations with Murakami showed, his copying and inhabiting of historical works are not only here to stay but have been a guiding thread in his work for a long time. The strategy is both old (Murakami is the third prominent artist, for instance, to produce a version of Sōtatsu’s seventeenth-century Wind and Thunder God, a designated national treasure) and in dialogue with recent developments in art history. In that Murakami has always been intent on using methods of European and American art to analyze and reinvent Japanese art, his works of this kind face a compounded risk of being misunderstood, of being seen by eyes outside Japan as mere copies or collagelike amalgams of historical works, and by eyes inside the country as a traditional affirmation of Japanese culture.

Murakami, though, sees these new works as both a fulfillment of ideas that have been incubating for him since the early 1980s and an exciting preview of developments to come. In this essay I will examine this history, both to affirm Murakami’s belief in the importance of his copying strategies and to illustrate some of their provocations. We must recognize that for Murakami and within certain traditions in Japan, to make a copy is simultaneously a far more reverential and far less precious activity than it is in the West. The fact that Murakami arrived at his copying method through his engagement with American and European art makes his strategy all the more complex and interesting.

Over the Edge of Superflat 

At the age of nineteen, Murakami saw in a department-store museum the work of the German artist Horst Janssen, specifically his Hokusai’s Spaziergang (Hokusai’s stroll, 1971–72), a series of forty-six etchings.¹ Murakami found Janssen’s take on Hokusai's woodblock prints wild and personal, “centered purely in the joy of drawing.”² It is easy to guess why a young Murakami felt this way: Janssen’s etchings are a translation of a sort, and also a grotesquerie; Hokusai is visible in them but only as a starting point for a chaotic journey of frenetic, almost frowsy line work. Murakami would later buy editions of the prints, which now reside in his Superflat Collection. He has displayed them in his Superflat exhibitions among other works demonstrating a cross-pollinating, interdimensional, and hybrid world of global art.

Hokusai’s Spaziergang struck Murakami powerfully, but Janssen’s influence was not recognizable in his work for a long time. Instead, Murakami took his early inspiration from American and European art of the 1980s and early ’90s. He has spoken often of being taken with the return to painting of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Terry Winters. He was also profoundly affected by artists who, in his view at the time, adopted a satirical, often cynical stance toward the excesses of American economic power. In an article in the New York Times in 1987, the critic Grace Glueck attempted to classify this work, using terms such as “Neo Geo,” “Smart Art,” and “Post-Abstract Abstraction” to describe the works of a diverse group of artists including Jeff Koons, Julia Wachtel, Peter Nagy, and Haim Steinbach.³ Looking at New York and European art from Japan in the late 1980s, and encountering it in person on a New York residency in 1994, Murakami found an interesting contrast to the traditional Nihonga painting that he had been studying and practicing. Nihonga uses mineral pigments and ink on silk and paper and is seen in Japan as a direct contrast to Western-style painting, called Yōga. For Murakami, to step out of the world of Nihonga (which few young artists studied in the 1980s) to engage with American contemporary art was an unusual and iconoclastic decision.

Murakami himself uses the term “Simulationism” for the art that he encountered in New York, which I find telling. The artist Peter Halley also liked the term, and his explanation of it seems apt in thinking of Murakami’s development as an artist: “Simulation, the fact of technical mediation replacing the natural thing, is such a big experience in our society. Air conditioning is a simulation of air; movies are a simulation of life; life is simulated by bio-mechanical manipulations.”⁴ In many ways the remark recalls Murakami’s early stance toward Japanese society: on the heels of their devastating defeat in World War II, he looked at his proud people and saw a culture obsessed with what he thought were infantilizing activities—an otaku culture devoted to anime, manga, and other cultural energies. The disaster of the war and the atomic bomb had created alternate realities, strange cultural mirrors for a society unseated and unsettled. In his embrace of these energies, his use of their techniques and imagery in works such as Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), Murakami could look closely at the physical and psychological damage through its creative forces. His work, in fact, was a form of simulation of culture for critique and absorption:

I was in my second year or so as a contemporary artist and was being influenced by New York Simulationism, making gadget-like works. I had majored in Nihonga at art university . . . so when it came to making contemporary art, I had to start from scratch and feel my way around. That’s why I had tried to imitate the New York movement, which was at the global forefront. At the same time, I was also searching for a way to break away from the gravitational pull of the American movement, and to that end I was working with Japanese product makers . . . to create high-quality works with craft-like worldview with Japanese sensibility.⁵

The two touchstones of Murakami’s early career are his Superflat theory, developed over the course of three curated exhibitions from 2000 to 2005, and @Murakami, curated by Paul Schimmel at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2007. Murakami’s Superflat exhibitions looked at the flat, two-dimensional nature of both contemporary and old Japanese art to speculate on the conditions of the post–World War II world through the lens of the interconnected economies of Japan and the United States, a theme that Murakami would take up energetically in his own work. ©Murakami summed up and classified this period of his art, tracking and contextualizing his work from 1991 to 2007.⁶ The central figure of the exhibition was Mr. D.O.B., who began as Murakami’s take on characters from Japanese popular culture such as Doraemon, from a manga series, and Sonic the Hedgehog, from the video-gaming world, but transformed over time to reflect both societal changes and personal changes in Murakami’s life.

To hear Murakami tell it, while he looked to Simulationism to develop his art-making strategies, his deeper understanding of Japanese culture came through Tsuji’s book Lineage of Eccentrics: Matabei to Kuniyoshi (1970), which showed a long line of painters taking a critical and satirical approach to Japanese culture. Tsuji’s “eccentrics”—notably the painters Jakuchū, Shōhaku, Nagasawa Rosetsu, and Kanō Sansetsu—were countercultural outlaws whose works sprang from tradition but innovated radically away from it. They were ahead of their time, and in their techniques and style—in alternating slow vectors of meditation with fast thrills of painterly virtuosity, for example—they often looked ahead 200 years to anime and manga, sharing a connection between image and story that Murakami considers essentially Japanese. Murakami saw the eccentrics as hungry to absorb the work of artists who had preceded them, both well-known figures and anonymous practitioners working in folk traditions, producing crafts and fine-art objects that were distributed in Japan as coming from China. Theirs was an art of hybridity and engagement with the past, of distortion and mistranslation.

But as with Janssen’s etchings, the art of the eccentrics was not directly visible in Murakami’s work, present only as an ethic of critique and satire. That would start to change, though, as Murakami began to take on historical imagery and the traditions of his predecessors directly. A key moment of this transformation could be found in ©Murakami in the paintings I open wide my eyes but see no scenery. I fix my gaze upon my heart and That I may time transcend, that a universe my heart may unfold (both 2007). These works were directly based in the paintings of Hakuin Ekaku, an eighteenth-century Zen monk and painter of the Rinzai school, whose lineage lay in China. Murakami’s paintings were versions of Hakuin’s Daruma—the Japanese name of the sage Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism and grand patriarch of Zen art—but they also carried the contemporary moment. Murakami’s Darumas have stunned, hallucinating eyes right out of the artist’s Time Bokan works (2001– ), which in turn were taken from the Time Bokan anime series. To see them was to consider that the Darumas were reflections less on their culture than on ours, looking out to us from the distant past.

Murakami sees the Daruma paintings as his first successful attempt to “digest and rework” the images of others, “eating them” into his paintings and “absorbing art history and practice to nourish my own creativity.”⁷ Although he was uncertain of the approach at the time, he would grow to see it as a fulfillment of his earliest motivations in art—of seeing Janssen “eat” Hokusai in a Tokyo department store. When he displayed the Darumas in 2007 at the Gagosian gallery in New York, he launched the exhibition with a traditional tea ceremony: “I wanted to bring something spiritually and culturally Japanese to a wider audience. . . . This is only the second time in my whole life I’ve dressed up like this. The first time was when I was at the tea master’s house.”⁸

Battle Royale

After the Daruma paintings, one might be tempted to assume that there are two Murakamis. The first continues as he has since the 1990s, gathering and deploying cultural energies including anime, manga, otaku, and kawaii to create the world of Mr. D.O.B (continuously morphing into characters such as Panda, Tan Tan Bo, Kaikai, and Kiki) and placing them back into culture using their own mechanisms of distribution. One can now find Murakami trading cards, cookies, and skateboards, as well as numerous commercial collaborations—merchandise (with the South Korean pop group NewJeans), NFTs (with the design studio RTFKT), watches (with the Swiss watchmaker Hublot), handbags (with Louis Vuitton), and music (with JP THE WAVY). There is also a feature-length film, Jellyfish Eyes (2013), and at the time of this writing Murakami has just opened a replica of a Chinese restaurant he frequented for years, KIJAYAKUTEI, in Asaka, Japan.

There is also a second Murakami, who went on from the Daruma paintings to create Murakami-style replicas of Zen ensō paintings, flower paintings by Kōrin, Edo-period Shunga erotica, woodblock prints by Hiroshige, and fish paintings based on blue-and-white Chinese jars from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). There are also works—for me the most mysterious of all—that cannot be recognized as having any Murakami signature at all: his collaboration with the ceramist Shin Murata, for example, to re-create the twentieth-century works of Kitaōji Rosanjin, themselves copies of the pottery ware made in Shigaraki, Japan, since at least the twelfth century. These ceramic works are contemporary yet they also vanish into history, making no distinction between the original and the copy at all, as though they were of the same essence.

The second Murakami seems to have matured through his increased interaction and friendship with Tsuji. In 2008, he and Tsuji collaborated for the Japanese magazine Geijutsu shincho. In what became known as their “picture contest,” Nippon e-awase, Tsuji would send Murakami images and thoughts chosen from a long history of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian art. In response, Murakami would make work based on Tsuji’s proposals. In one of the most important books published on Murakami’s work since the Superflat exhibition catalogue series—Battle Royale! Japanese Art History (2017)—the contest is tracked as a call-and-response between the two men.⁹

During the picture contest, Tsuji introduced Murakami to Rosetsu’s painting Five Hundred Arhats (1798), an entirely resolved narrative world of hundreds of Buddhist saints occupying a space about 1 1/4-inch square. The 500 arhats were Buddhist saints who had reached nirvana but remained on earth to guide humans on the path to enlightenment (arhat is Sanskrit for “one who is worthy”). It was only near the end of this collaboration, though, when Tsuji offered Murakami the same story in an eighteenth-century work by Kanō Kazunobu—the arhats deployed over a series of a hundred scrolls—that Murakami became absorbed by the legend. Tsuji continued to offer Murakami paintings from the pictorial tradition dealing with these saints, or arhats, including a series of ninth-century scrolls attributed to the Chinese painter Guanxiu, notable for the figures’ bizarrely world-weary appearances. The repetition of the images lent power to the tradition and applicability across the span of centuries.

In the spirit of Kazunobu’s monumental project, Murakami and his studio prepared 100 panels, each measuring three meters by one, with the aim of completing the painting in one year. (Kazunobu spent ten years on his scrolls and died before finishing them.) They delved into the theme of the arhats, researching the individual characters who populate the story and the religion that gave rise to the legend. Early in the process, they visited Kazunobu’s grave, at the temple of Zōjō-ji in Tokyo, during which chief priests there asked them pointed questions that were tough to answer: “What brought you to be involved in the production of a Five Hundred Arhats painting and to study Buddhism? What is Buddhism in today’s world, and what is the relationship between Buddhism and painting?”¹⁰ Murakami not only finished the 100-meter Arhat painting, which debuted at Al Riwaq, Doha, in 2012, but in its wake seemed to be an artist transformed.

Murakami’s artworks based on the arhats are now seen as direct reactions to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown.¹¹ But it is important to remember the details of how he became engaged with the imagery—that his involvement with Tsuji developed organically as a call-and-response before the crisis, that the collaboration expanded his studio toolbox with new techniques and approaches from many different historical and contemporary sources, and that his work never illustrates a specific event.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the zenith of this period with Tsuji was the painting In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, which debuted at Gagosian, New York, in 2014 alongside a large gate and two enormous demon sculptures, one red and one blue. Murakami’s gate was inspired Akira Kurosawa’s famous film Rashomon (1950), based on stories by the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and set on the ruins of Rajōmon, a gate to the ancient capital of Heian-Kyo (now called Kyoto). In the Land of the Dead took up the subject of the Immortals, masters of Daoist spiritual discipline who have been symbols of resilience and prosperity in China and beyond for well over a thousand years. In the grouping of the gate, the painting, and the demons, the exhibition could be seen as a threshold between a hurting earth and a troubled heaven in the aftermath of the Great Tōhoku Earthquake. Also on view in the Gagosian exhibition were paintings (all 2014) based on imagery from a painting by Winters, works showing the ongoing metamorphosis of Mr. D.O.B. and paintings using the spray-paint language of street tagging. The energies of the moment—steeped in disaster and death—and Murakami’s relationship with Tsuji had created a two-way street between the deep past and the present.

There are, of course, not two Murakamis, but there is a temptation (especially for Western viewers) to separate the new from the old, to celebrate one side of Murakami to the avoidance of the other. Instead, Murakami finds a synthesis of history and his breathlessly new material in the very idea of the copy itself, and in the rootedness of the craft of reproduction in Japanese culture. One becomes an artist in Japan, traditionally, by painstakingly copying a teacher’s originals. One becomes Murakami by painstakingly copying a teacher’s originals in the spirit of Janssen, of “eating” history and using it to reawaken its logic and to find its action in the present. The logic of simulation, the logic of Janssen, and the logic of a very Japanese form of honoring and reconjuring a historical form all come together in a seamless way.

Kyoto 

On a recent trip to see Murakami’s new work in Kyoto, on the artist’s advice I took a day trip to the Ise Shrine. Ise is one of the most sacred locations in all Japan, and its buildings are rebuilt in their entirety every twenty years. For this reason, UNESCO does not consider Ise one of its world heritage sites, despite its importance to the Japanese people.¹² I knew that visitors could not enter this working Shinto shrine, but I was surprised that I was able to see the gravel footprint of what would become the next shrine next to the current one. I arrived at Ise at a time when the construction of the next complex had not yet begun; it was striking to see the shrine on one side and the empty space reserved for the new shrine on the other. For me, growing up in the United States, the idea of rebuilding a building every twenty years was as strange as it was to UNESCO.

The reconstructed building is not a replica; it is no more and no less the Ise shrine than the old building. They are both the Ise Shrine, though one building is physical and the other is currently empty space. The idea of the Ise Shrine both does and does not live in the shrine’s structures, and the cycle of building neither entirely creates nor destroys the shrine. What is important, it seems, is the spirit of renewal, the transmission of knowledge, and the embedding of human activities in the ethic of nature, which is cyclical and predicated on death and rebirth. There is no “original” Ise Shrine.

This is not easy to understand for a Westerner. After 9/11, for instance, one of the rejected proposals for the disaster site was to re-create the World Trade Center towers exactly as they were. While the practice is common in Japan, it is not in the West. When something is re-created in the West, it is often seen as involving a loss of meaning, or as kitsch (an example would be Colonial Williamsburg). In Japan, however, there seems to be no essential loss of meaning in the re-creation of something lost—or even of something not lost, as in Ise. (The question is known in philosophy as Theseus’s Paradox).

I am not a philosopher, so I am probably ill equipped to grapple with these ideas properly, but Murakami’s projects involving replication or copying seem to me to meditate on this phenomenon in Japan. In copying there is an affirmation, but also a translation, a distortion, and a remembrance. There is not—as is perceived in similar gestures in the West—a loss or a destruction of what is called “aura.” I am not troubled by Murakami’s copying, but instead find it expressing something vital about culture in Japan and something important for people outside Japan to understand, despite the difficulty. And that Murakami adds Janssen’s expressive takes on tradition and the idea of simulation to these ideas gives them an additional dimension.

I think it is difficult, at times, to understand how closely Murakami’s world holds the past, and how closely Japan itself holds its traditions. Murakami tells me that this is especially true in Kyoto, whose people still identify themselves as the Heian people and separate themselves from the rest of Japan, although Kyoto has not been the site of the Japanese capital since 1869. Murakami lives in Kyoto and is often in transition between it and his studio in Miyoshi, a suburb of Tokyo, observing weekly, sometimes daily, the transition between the two cultures. Perhaps his engagement with Kyoto, at the invitation of the Kyocera museum, began as an exhibition and is now personal. Perhaps Murakami—whose early career developed in Tokyo and in the enthusiasms of the Akihabara, Nakano City, and Harajuku neighborhoods—now turns to Kyoto, to, in his words, “express it as a part of Japan.”¹³

The paintings that Murakami made and continues to make in the wake of the Kyocera exhibition are deeply personal. His reproduction and riff on Kōrin’s eighteenth-century Peacock and Hollyhock Screen is filled with thoughts of another of Murakami’s teachers, Matazō Kayama, who once validated Murakami’s aesthetic judgement by praising Kōrin’s screen as Murakami was admiring it. Another diptych is based on Kanō Eitoku’s sixteenth-century Chinese Lion Screen; Murakami began this work after watching the 2024 television series Shōgun, based on James Clavell’s novel of the same title (1975). Watching the TV show, Murakami had an overwhelming feeling of being in the Sengoku Warring States period (1467–1600)—he felt he was engaging with the art of the time in its context. Another work inspired by Shōgun, based on a section of the six-part folding screen Shihon chakushoku daigo hanamizu, made by an unknown artist in the sixteenth century, is rooted in Murakami’s desire to show moments of peace within times of turbulence, an “underlying gentleness and quest for happiness.” “In the upper left corner” of the work, he wrote in a letter to me, “my signature character, Flower, smiles brightly, giving the impression of observing this historical scene through the lens of 2024, as though time-traveling to witness it firsthand.”¹⁴

When I read this note, I was taken back to a moment in Kyoto during my travels to visit Murakami. During the run of Mononoke Kyoto at Kyocera, Murakami installed his monumental gold-gilded Flower Parent and Child (2020)—thirty-two feet high—in the middle of a small pond. The sculpture was situated beautifully, its reflection mirrored on the surface of the water, and I was told that in its placement, the sculpture was meant to recall Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion—one of Kyoto’s most famous temples. Flower Parent and Child was heavily photographed, and during the run of the exhibition, many of its 460,000 visitors took a selfie with the sculpture. On my last day in Kyoto, I decided to climb up to the Taho-to Pagoda at the Eikando Temple, off Kyoto’s Philosopher’s walk, a location known for its fall foliage. From the pagoda, one can take in the scale and majesty of Kyoto, seeing modern residences, traditional houses, and, at times, the roofs of Kyoto’s many temples and shrines peeking through the trees. All told, the view is a lot like Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu. From where I was sitting, in the city directly echoed in Matabei’s painting, which was made to preserve a moment in the history of the place, it was a delight to see Flower Parent and Child in the distance, now out of Murakami’s copy and inhabiting the scene.