Of Toys and Co: Murakami Takashi: The 500 Arhats Exhibition

Got a pair of free tickets for Murakami Takashi: The 500 Arhats Exhibition in the Mori Art Museum, so we went on a weekend back in mid December. When we got there, we were greatly surprised to learn all cameras and cam-corders were A-OK! Pretty cool, I thought! I took a ton of pictures, and since the artist is ok with sharing his arts with the world, I didn't watermark my photos of the arts either. Feel free to take and share!

This is probably some of the best art collection I've ever seen. Granted, I haven't seen that many, but this one just stands out thanks to its density of texture and colors, and its chaotic mixture of religious and mythological symbols.

And by texture, I mean this! From afar, this piece looks like it's on a plain black background. Nope.

Yes, these all have texture beneath. Pretty nuts.

If you think some of this look familiar, that's because you might have seen Murakami's work in collaboration with Louis Vuitton or with Shu Uemura.

Here's a panel that's too wide for my camera to snap. But I didn't want to take a panorama either because there were tons of people walking around. The elephant is at far left, then the tiger, then the deer with a tree growing out of its head.

And yes, this deer with a tree growing out of its head is a direct inspiration from Princess Mononoke's forest god.

Kappa standing on a turtle.

Below are the collection's namesake pieces, the four 500 arhats panels, all of which are way too long to be taken in one shot, aside from panorama shots. So I tried to take an angled shot showing the rest of the panel and then chop them up into parts.

Also, each panel features one of the four mystic beasts that governs the four directions: the azure dragon (青龍, seiryuu) of the east, the white tiger (白虎, byakko) of the west, the vermillion bird (朱雀, suzaku) of the south, and the black tortoise (玄龜, genbu) of the north.

The collection starts with the panel featuring the white tiger.

This one is supposed to be black tortoise, but I remember reading that the artist had changed the tortoise to something else, which explains why I can't find a turtle anywhere on this panel ^.^"