“Is that the real currency?” Before July 11, invite visitors from Murakami Muraka Kimura to attend the new exhibition in Murakami, “japonisme → Cognitive Revolution: Learn from Hiroshima.” The Japanese artist brought French Impressionist to his characteristic screen printing technology. Claude Monet (2025), a sleek copy that may trick you from the distance of strabismus. Convenient, strabismus distance is a popular suggestion for the best way to view impressionism. Murakami knows his audience. He knew they had been looking at the screen and watching through the screen, and the obvious temptation was now harder than the halo of originality that was once.
The same fate himself became Murakami himself, not a serious artist. However, his skills and knowledge of art history are evident in this exhibition, including a PhD in traditional Japanese painting. Despite the appearance (and including several examples of his Louis Vuitton monogram canvas, which is a moral for artists working with luxury brands), the show seems to be less aware of external appeal and more related to introverted exploration. Most of the work comes from Murakami’s view of Hiroshima 100 Edo landscapes (1856-58), the series began with his 2024 performance at the Brooklyn Museum (which contains a set of Guangzhi Monuments). Murakami expanded the prints to make them immersive canvases, adding glitter and some of his iconic characters to create a “difference difference” effect, but he essentially devoted himself to tracing one of the great treasures of Japanese culture. In this case, copying is a form of reverence and even inheritance: Muarakami Artnews That “maybe I’m not outside the story-I haven’t seen how threads connect.”
Murakami Takashi’s exhibition “japonisme → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshi’s Aphrodisiac”, 2025, in Gagosian, New York.
Photo Kei Okano. Courteous artists and Gargos. ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
This story is not limited to Japanese art. The new thing here is Murakami’s reproduction of European artists including Monet, who themselves were influenced in Japan, what the 19th-century French critic Philip Burty called “japonisme”. Just like Murakami’s own aesthetic, super-flowing, which can be traced back to the bankruptcy of the Japanese economy after World War II, the Japonicism follows the aggression of the formerly closed states invasion of the West. By the 1860s, gunboat diplomacy led to asymmetric treaties that forced Japan to engage in adverse trade with the West and prompted the influx of Japanese art, which seemed to be radical in the European eye.
Artists were new to Japanese prints, including Hiroshige, using strong colors, flat planes in a vertical direction and highlighting the patterns they observed in Japanese art as they worked to develop a modern way of painting. Under the influence of the Japanese, recognizing a new sense of reality, one based on the nature of things, rather than hallucination imitation, declared another critic Théodore Duret as “it was impossible before Japan; the painter always lies.”
Murakami Takashi’s exhibition “japonisme → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshi’s Aphrodisiac”, 2025, in Gagosian, New York.
Photo Kei Okano. Courteous artists and Gargos. ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
What is the truth in this new iteration of japonisme? When it is more likely to be condemned as a grant, Murakami appears to be introducing who has the right to copy whom. Claude Monet’s “La Japanaise” (2025) A portrait of Monet’s 1876 wife Camille dressed in a kimono. (Monet was a controversial subject in 2015, when the Boston Museum exhibited it with kimono visitors and invited visitors to try it out, as if they could assume identity and discard it like costumes.) In addition to the signature signature copied by Monet, Murakami added a distinct Latin text to the narrative. He similarly reproduced the cover of a French illustration magazine dedicated to Japan (The cover of the Paris illustration in Figure 2, butterfly was released on May 1, 1886, 2025), reproduced in print by Japanese geisha. Van Gogh (Van Gogh (Murakami’s work is also on the show) tracked the woman’s body from the same cover in 1887, bringing Murakami to a modern art model that freely takes advantage of everything it is available.
Still, cultural borrowing has consequences, including transforming the actual figures that make up these cultures into easy-to-easy patterns. Murakami may suggest these consequences in his incorporation of UFOs into several replicas: a boat floating on the bridge James McNeill Whistler’s “Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge” (2025). In addition to introducing surprisingly strange elements, UFOs also cite current questions about so-called “illegal” aliens, asking what aspects of other cultures we are willing to accept and what varying degrees of differences tolerate. As part of “Mortos Beauty,” a more annoying reaction from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the meticulously curated performance on “Chinoiserie,” another example of Europeans drawing on Asian cultural influence. At the end of a series of galleries, the bodies of Asian women are shown, from tea cups to mirrors, Patty Chang abyss (2025) is a porcelain table that signaled the holes of the 2021 Atlanta Spa Massacre, making these bodies real and making their grants a fatal serious problem.
