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This article is part of our latest special section on Museums, which focuses on new artists, new audiences and new ways of thinking about exhibitions.
The centerpiece of the Takashi Murakami exhibition opening in May at the Broad in Los Angeles is a painting so large that, until now, the museum had never displayed it on one wall.
The painting, “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” is an 82-foot-long explosion of colorful, cartoonishly grotesque figures and motifs appropriated from Japanese and Chinese history.
The figures — a blue hermit riding a dragon, another holding a baby — are based on the Daoist Immortals. According to legend, the Immortals were human beings who gained eternal life through some combination of meditation, good deeds, trickery and elixir-drinking. More relevant to Mr. Murakami’s work, they have been symbols of resilience, healing and prosperity for more than a thousand years.
That painting and another work that will be presented, the 32-foot-long “100 Arhats,” are examples of Mr. Murakami’s processing and responding to disaster. (Arhats are Buddhist saints who have achieved nirvana but remain on earth to guide humans toward enlightenment.)
The exhibition, titled “Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” which will be Mr. Murakami’s first solo exhibition at the Broad, runs through Sept. 25.
Ed Schad, a curator and publications manager at the Broad, said Mr. Murakami is always thinking about how the past influences the present. “For example, what could these Buddhist saints say to the world today?” he said.
In the catalog accompanying the exhibition, Mr. Schad writes that the heart of this story — saints delaying their own transcendence for the sake of the living — speaks intimately to disaster. “The arhats mediate a wish for the divine, a dream of perfection with a reality of pain and loss, of work needing to be done, of lives and livelihoods in need of rebuilding,” he said.
Both of these monumental paintings were completed in the years following one of the greatest catastrophes in Japanese history, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster. Now, they are being reinterpreted for the current moment, in light of natural and man-made catastrophes and crises that include climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and, most recently, the war in Ukraine.
Creating art as a response to difficult times and the cultural shifts they often catalyze is not new to Mr. Murakami. Over the last four decades, he has explored a variety of subjects through his art, including the effects of globalization, societal changes in postwar Japan, the evolution of popular culture, consumerism, spirituality and religion.
The 18 pieces in the exhibition, which encompasses the entirety of the Broad’s Murakami collection as well as loans, reflect on healing and beauty as well as disaster and recovery. Mr. Schad said the works, which span sculpture, painting and wallpaper, exemplify the ways Mr. Murakami, 60, has channeled his creativity following times of crisis and uncertainty.
“Murakami as an artist is very good at looking at the energies present at any given moment in the culture and responding to them,” he said. “Because when we go through a collective trauma, like war, earthquake, tsunami or a global pandemic, where every one of us is touched, there is a vast reorientation of priorities.”
Paradoxically, Mr. Murakami is best known for his happy, anime-inspired characters, many of whom will be featured in the Broad exhibition, such as Mr. DOB, a large, grinning Mickey Mouse-like character, and Nurse Ko2, a wide-eyed, hypersexualized female nurse.
Mr. Murakami frequently incorporates elements of manga and anime — art forms associated with graphic novels and video games — into his work. He operates under a theory of art he calls “Superflat,” which refers to the relationship of two-dimensional imagery in manga and anime to historical Japanese painting, as well as to what he sees as a lack of distinction — or a flattening — between high and low art in Japanese culture.
This flattening is evident in Mr. Murakami’s frequent collaborations with creators of pop and consumer culture. They extend to artists who work in the fashion, film, music and gaming industries, including Louis Vuitton, Vans and the singer Billie Eilish, with whom he created a music video and a T-shirt. These partnerships have also brought Japanese culture to a wider world.
Yet, for all its apparent cheer, much of Mr. Murakami’s work harbors dark undercurrents. Nurse Ko2, for example, represents an unrealistic and fetishized version of the feminine, while Mr. DOB — whose name derives from the Japanese word dobojite, and translates roughly as “Why? Why?” — has been understood as a continually evolving alter ego for the artist.
Through a translator, Mr. Murakami said his motivation to create his art is tied to the constant anxiety he feels.
“I create such positive images driven by my desire to dispel my unease,” he said. “Watching the developments of the Covid situation and the war in Ukraine, I grow increasingly uneasy. And I produce more work.”
That unease often manifests as the grotesque.
For instance, one character that appears in the exhibition is a monster known as Tan Tan Bo. In the 2018 painting “Tan Tan Bo a.k.a. Gerotan: Scorched by the Blaze in the Purgatory of Knowledge,” the monster is depicted as vomiting.
“That painting has been interpreted as a kind of consumerist energy,” Mr. Schad, the curator, explained. “A monster that has engorged itself to the point of vomiting.”
Throughout the Broad’s exhibition, one is reminded of the ways Mr. Murakami makes sense of tragedy, both by looking back at ancient history and turning his gaze forward, toward the evolving forces that shape our culture. His responses may be Superflat, but the intent behind them is not.
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