Profile | How Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami’s new exhibition intertwines his ‘entire artistic practice with Kyoto as a context’
- Takashi Murakami’s first large-scale solo show in Japan in eight years features more than 170 of his works – though not all of them are finished
- He says Kyoto natives ‘reject other Japanese people’ and believe the city is still the country’s centre, similar to the attitude in New York, where he has lived
On the eve of the private opening of his first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan in eight years, Takashi Murakami posted on Instagram, at 3am, a selfie of him in his gallery captioned: “Still making.”
“I couldn’t sleep. The whole night I was preparing for the exhibition, then I slept for two hours on the bullet train between Tokyo and Kyoto,” he says.
On February 3, the 62-year-old Japanese contemporary artist opened “Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto” at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art to mark the institution’s 90th anniversary.
It is also his first Japanese solo show outside Tokyo, his birthplace and the home of his gallery and art business, Kaikai Kiki; and a love letter to the art history of Kyoto, where his family of four, including his two young children, relocated after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
The exhibition features more than 170 artworks, most of which are new creations, and has a “work-in-progress” format. It was put together by a team of more than 40 assistants.
A notice on a wall states that some of the works on display are unfinished and will be updated “on a rolling basis” as a separate set of works is produced throughout the exhibition period.
