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Kyoto City Museum of Art 90th Anniversary Exhibition: Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto

A large-scale solo exhibition by Takashi Murakami, an artist at the forefront of contemporary art, will be held at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art as it celebrates its 90th anniversary this year.

Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) has questioned the value and essential meaning of art through the appropriation of and collaborations with popular culture such as manga and anime. His career can be understood as an ongoing effort to challenge the international art scene, in which the West has become the accepted norm, providing new stimulus from a unique Japanese perspective. Murakami’s highly acclaimed works are in museum collections around the world, and he has been named in Art Review magazine’s “Power 100” (the 100 most influential people in the art world) for ten consecutive years.

For Murakami, who has been deeply interested in and inspired by Kyoto as a place where eshi— Japanese-style painters—were active throughout the Edo period, this will be his first major solo exhibition in Japan in approximately eight years and his first outside of Tokyo. Murakami is currently working on special versions of works inspired by Japanese art, such as Kawaii - vacances (Summer Vacation in the Kingdom of the Golden) (2008 [illustration 1]) and the Korin series (2015 [illustration 2,3,4]), as well as numerous new works that reference Kyoto and its history. These works will be shown to the public for the first time in Kyoto, a place where beautiful traditions and urban vitality intersect. Please look forward to seeing the newly created world of Takashi Murakami, who has always constructed an overwhelming aesthetic experience.