Japan Supernatural

History, folklore and pop culture converge in AGNSW’s blockbuster exhibition of fantastical art from Japan – and in the career of its figurehead, superstar artist Takashi Murakami

IN JAPAN, FOR several centuries, mysterious supernatural beings known as yokai have been central to understanding fate. Yokai run the gamut from a vengeful monster cat to a trickster river otter; a long-necked woman whose head goes out hunting in the middle of the night; the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth; and even a froglike humanoid said to attack swimmers in murky waters. These spooky beings were believed to be the cause of plenty of good and ill fortune, and depictions of them were a central part of Japanese art from the mid-1700s by artists like Toriyama Sekien, who made mass-produced books illustrating these monsters. Sekien also made scrolls showing a procession of monsters, designed to be unrolled frame by frame and read as they’re unveiled. The scrolls are considered to be one of the starting points for animation, and their characters still show up in Japanese culture: they feature in Studio Ghibli’s

Spirited Away, and are a clear inspiration for several

Pokémon. The appearance of yokai in Japanese culture is the subject of Japan Supernatural, the Art Gallery of NSW’s major summer show, which features more than 200 artworks dating from the 1700s through to a brand new commission by Takashi Murakami. His work, titled ‘Japan Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters’, brings together yokai and samurai from the Edo period in an eccentric, enormous canvas. At three metres tall and ten metres wide, it’s the largest single painting to enter the gallery’s permanent international collection. Murakami is known for straddling the divide between high and low art, and is in demand

Yokai are a clear inspiration for Pokémon

with major galleries as much as with pop culture figures like Kanye West and Billie Eilish, and fashion labels including Louis Vuitton. That makes him the perfect artist to be making 21st-century depictions of yokai, although he says their inclusion in his artwork isn’t designed to challenge any sort of cultural hierarchy. “I’ve just made those motifs much bigger and now that’s in a museum,” Murakami says. “So it happens to become high art. But I’m not consciously working on that dichotomy anymore.” In fact, another recent Murakami work uses Godzilla as its central motif. “It turned out to be a pretty good work and I think maybe 200 years from now, people will look at it as an amazing artwork.”

Despite Murakami’s success in the west (his art and design company, Kaikai Kiki, employs 300 people across offices in the US and

Japan) the Japanese response to his work has been less glowing. When asked if Japan has been slower to embrace his work, Murakami says nobody in Japan really embraces it at all. “They like to see western art that’s imported, but they don’t like to think about things according to western rules or western thinking. I’m analysing Japanese culture based on western rules, and they really don’t like it.” But like Murakami, yokai haven’t always been popular with Japan. In the late 1800s, when the country began to embrace scientific thought, they fell out of favour. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when manga started to boom, that yokai were popularised again. “After Japan lost the war and everything sort of flattened in terms of mindset and culture, that’s when that [high/low art] hierarchy vanished,” Murakami says. “So it doesn’t have such a long history, socially.” Ben Neutze à

Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery Rd, The Domain, Sydney 2000. 02 9225 1700. www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au. Thu-Tue 10am-5pm; Wed 10am-10pm. $0-$25. Until Mar 8.