Tantalizingly vivid flowers grin with open mouths, and flattened creatures swell with emotive expressions. Takashi Murakami’s art is a candy-colored invitation into the past.
But there’s more to the famed Japanese artist’s work than a rainbow-paved journey of bright hues and fantastical faces. His newest exhibit, Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, which opens May 25 and runs through Sept. 7 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, comments on how generational trauma informs modern culture. The show began at The Broad in Los Angeles in 2022 and has been reimagined and expanded for Cleveland.
“There’s a rich and complex engagement with global history and the nuances of our time and recent past,” says the CMA’s curator of contemporary art Emily Leibert.
A painter, sculptor and filmmaker, Murakami has built a worldwide following around his integration of fine art and commercial culture. Pulling heavily from anime, manga and the digital realm, his pantheon of colorful characters established the “superflat” art movement, which has been featured in collaborative works with brands including Louis Vuitton, Vans, Supreme, Crocs and most recently the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Superflat refers to the flattened forms in Japanese art and plays on the supposed shallowness of Japanese consumer culture,” says Leibert. “He is playing with our expectations, that they will be shallow, but he is actually allowing for more complex interpretations.”
In the CMA exhibition, visitors are welcomed by a reconceptualized Yumedono, or Hall of Dreams, temple in the museum’s three-story Ames Family Atrium. Believed to heal people from suffering, the original octagonal temple in Nara, Japan, hosts a seventh-century Buddhist statue depicting Shōtoku Taishi. Unique to the Cleveland exhibition, the recreated temple serves as a physical and symbolic centerpiece for the vibrant sea of Murakami paintings and harks back to the rich historical collection of Japanese art that the museum pairs with them.
“The past can be a window to the present,” says Leibert, “which is important at a museum like the CMA, which is encyclopedic.”
Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow responds to three historical crises: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. during World War II, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Art, like religion, can be a rehabilitative agent in times of crisis. Murakami’s work speaks to those cultural energies.
“Murakami is interested in the ways that trauma impacts individuals,” says Leibert, “not only manifested through grief, but also through an outpouring of creativity, religious fervor and obsessions with a parallel universe found in the digital realm.”
Displayed in the temple are four new paintings, all created in 2024. “Blue Dragon,” “Vermillion Bird,” “White Tiger” and “Black Tortoise” emphasize Murakami’s recent fascination with the Japanese city Kyoto as a vital keeper of many of the country’s cultural traditions, including monumental screen painting, ikebana, Kabuki theater, geisha and teahouse traditions. This engagement with Japanese culture is enhanced by the CMA’s vast Japanese art collection. “Looking at our historic collections, there’s a real relationship to contemporary art,” says Leibert.
Among the pieces not to miss, Leibert points to the colossal 10-by-32-foot painting “100 Arhats,” which references Buddhist-
enlightened individuals who delay their own journey to transcendence in order to guide others on their path to enlightenment. Murakami depicts the Arhats in his iconic figure-warping style, creating towering, almost ghastly, 2-D characters among classic religious iconography.
Murakami’s most iconic character, Mr. DOB, acts as a guide throughout the exhibition. The manga-inspired mascot, who sports sharp teeth, glaring eyes and a globular face, first emerged in 1994 and takes inspiration from iconic characters like Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty. Central in Murakami’s works, Mr. DOB serves as Murakami’s ever-evolving alter ego, taking on a multitude of transformations throughout the exhibition, paralleling the experience of monumental change undergone by the Japanese public due to these three major historical events. Among the bright, beaming flowers, prodigious depictions of dragons and gigantic glittering tigers, a throughline of creativity emerges that fuels Murakami’s questioning of greater meaning through crisis.
“There are so many ways to address crisis, healing, outrage and escapist fantasy,” says Leibert. “He issues an irresistible invitation, and then once you’re in the art, there’s this opportunity to ask bigger questions and consider more complex issues.”
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