Mori Art Museum to Display TAKASHI MURAKAMI: THE 500 ARHATS Exhibit, 10/31

The Mori Art Museum is pleased to present "Takashi Murakami: The 500 Arhats" from Saturday, October 31, 2015, through Sunday, March 6, 2016, marking the first large-scale Murakami exhibition in Japan in 14 years. Takashi Murakami is known as one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists working today. In addition to his retrospective, which began at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and later travelled to prominent museums around the world, he has held solo exhibitions and large-scale installations in a number of venues such as The Palace of Versailles and the Rockefeller Center, astounding the global audience with the massive scale and polished quality of his works.

Through his artistic endeavors, Murakami has linked 'otaku culture,' character iconography, and Japanese art history against the backdrop of the thematic landscape of post-war Japan, developing the concept of 'Superflat,' which has now left its definite mark in the contemporary art world. He explored this concept with his "Superflat Trilogy," a series of three curated exhibitions held at multiple locations around the world. Its final chapter, "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture" (New York, 2005) was given the 2005 award for Best Thematic Museum Show by the American branch of the International Association of Art Critics.

In this long-awaited solo exhibition in Japan, Murakami's 100-meter-long painting, The 500 Arhats, surely one of the largest paintings ever produced in global art history, will be shown in Japan for the first time. The work was created as a token of gratitude to the nation of Qatar, one of the first to offer assistance in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and was unveiled in Doha in 2012, the following year. The exhibition will comprise The 500 Arhats and a number of new works in which he continues to offer up new challenges to the history of contemporary art. This exhibition will be an unparalleled opportunity to encounter Murakami as a mature artist working with astonishing scale, energy, and artistic accomplishment.