Eliana Willis

Inside the palace of the high priest of Vodoun in Benin, there is a framed portrait of George Floyd, with Breanna Taylor and Rashad Lewis on either side. Below their images is a line written in red letters: “Remember your ancestors.”
The Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu saw this on a research tour through the country that he took after he was tasked with the honor of curating the first pavilion for Benin at the Venice Biennale. Back in December 2022, he had received an unexpected phone call from the Beninese President asking him to stage the first pavilion for the West African nation. Nwagbogu then went on a journey across the country to meet with traditional rulers and custodians of culture to discuss Beninese history, culture, art, and the impact of the transatlantic slave trade.
The title of the pavilion “Everything Precious is Fragile” was inspired by Nwagbogu’s meetings with these rulers, and the Yoruba concept of Gèlèdè that focuses on the feminist idea of “rematriation” or advocating giving and receiving. The pavilion, entirely funded by the government of Benin, is among a total of 13 African countries that are presenting official national pavilions—up from nine in 2022.
Benin: Curator Azu Nwagbogu on his trip around Benin. Credit: Ugochukwu Emeberiodo
Among the 13 are three additional debutants staging their first ever national pavilions. These are Senegal, which will present “Bokk – Bounds” by Senegalese Alioune Diagne in the Arsenale, staged with Galerie Templon. Ethiopia is presenting “Prejudice and Belonging,” featuring the work of Tesfaye Urgessa, and Tanzania is displaying the group show “A Flight in Reverse Mirrors.” Returning African nations include Egypt, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
“We are not interested in treating Venice like some kind of Mecca where we go every two years and that’s it,” Nwagbogu noted. “Europe is not our center. Europe is an important place to have a conversation, but it is not the center of the world. After Venice, we need to bring the focus and intellectual capital back to Africa to have important conversations.”
The 13 pavilions are not alone—there are another 18 national pavilions from Europe and North America that are presenting artists from Africa or the diaspora. These include the Dutch Pavilion, which is showing the work of Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, a collective of Congolese artists. Kapwani Kiwanga, a Canadian artist of Tanzanian descent, is presenting new work for Canada. French-Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet is representing France, co-curated by Cindy Sissokho and Céline Kopp; Portuguese-Angolan artist Mónica de Miranda is showing work alongside others in the Portuguese national pavilion, and British filmmaker John Akomfrah, of Ghanaian descent, is representing Great Britain.
John Akomfrah at his London studio, 2016. Photo: © Jack Hems, courtesy of the British Council.
Artists from the continent can also be found in Pedrosa’s main exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere”—where 54 artists from the 331 artists and collectives are African. Participants include Kudzanai Chiurai from Zimbabwe, known for his mixed media work that comprises paintings, videos, drawings, and photographs to tackle socio-political issues in his home country; Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi, who is 93 years old, will also be on view. He is known for his paintings and drawings that combine motifs from African, Islamic, and Western art.
“Venice is like an old lady that needs to be redressed,” Cameroonian-French curator Simon Njami said in a telephone interview from Venice. He has curated “The Blue Note” for the Ivory Coast Pavilion, which features five Ivorian artists inspired by the blue note in jazz music, which has its origins in the music made by African slaves. “I think that more African countries are understanding the importance of soft power. The Venice Biennale is still a platform where people can show their skills and talk for themselves. I think there’s a growing consciousness of the importance in showing art. Africa has a certain image and art can give another image.”
Work of Alioune Diagne, who is representing Senegal at the Venice Biennale. Photo © Laurent Edeline. © Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris, Brussels, New York
“[‘The Blue Note’] is about resilience,” Njami said. “It’s a double-sided lesson for Africans and all people complaining that they’re victims due to colonialization. The lesson is that people with nothing to their names and no land invented the blue note that made a revolution in music because it created blues jazz. You don’t need to be rich to be able to say something.”
Njami, who previously called Africa’s participation in Venice a mess, believes that this year more African governments are supporting their country’s artists through representation that allows them to display their art on their own terms and not through the eyes of foreign curators. He said that more African nations will likely be represented in Venice in the future as further governments realize the social and political value of showing their art internationally.
But they do not always return. Ghana, which made an impressive debut in 2019 and participated again in 2022, is not presenting a pavilion this year. A Ghanaian art dealer said over telephone that this was due to a lack of funding.
Artists themselves are often key lobbyists helping to push for the launch of national pavilions and for their continuation year after year. “Since I was an art student, I always wondered why Ethiopia wasn’t represented in Venice,” the Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa, who is representing the country for their first pavilion, said in an interview.
Tesfaye Urgessa is representing Ethiopia at the Venice Biennale. Courtesy of Tesfaye Urgessa and Saatchi Yates. Photography by Kameron Cooper.
Urgessa’s alluring abstract figurative paintings, which are determined and unapologetic, reflect his experiences of racism after moving from Ethiopia to Germany. One year ago, he requested support from the Ministry of Tourism. After a lengthy conversation and much convincing, the ministry’s officials agreed. Yet funding for the Ethiopian pavilion did not come from the state, but was raised from private donors.
Nigeria, which staged its first pavilion in 2019, is another example of a mix of state blessing coupled with private funding (other pavilions in the Giardini, like the U.K., have mixed sponsorship). Titled “Nigeria Imaginary,” it will feature works by Ndidi Dike and Yinka Shonibare in a group show. Its main sponsorship comes from Qatar Museums. “There’s a real sense of optimism and dreaming that sits within the Nigerian psyche,” Aindrea Emelife, an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art at MOWAA (the Museum of West African Art which is due to open this fall) and the curator of the pavilion, said in an interview.
“Nigerians often say, ‘no condition is permanent,’” noted the curator, who is based between between Lagos and London. “It’s such an interesting phrase because it acknowledges that things currently are not great, but it still reflects the opportunity that things could be better.” She emphasized how the theme of the pavilion looks back at specific moments in Nigerian history and personal memory. It also “explores roads not taken and a new imagination for the nation,” she added.
Aindrea Emelife is curating the Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Courtesy Aindrea Emelife
While African art is more present than ever, questions over misrepresentation linger. The Cameroonian pavilion is once again jointly curated by Cameroonian Paul Emmanuel Loga Mahop and Sandro Orlandi Stagl from Italy. Stagl was one of two foreign curators responsible for Kenya’s controversial showing in 2015, which the African nation then disowned. This year, the group exhibition is called “Nemo propheta in patria” (translated: no man is a prophet in his own land) and includes Jean Michel Dissake and Hako Hankson.
Crucially, increased African representation at the Venice Biennale means greater visibility and dialogue on the African continent as well. It also offers a chance to change the narrative. “Whether we show our works here in Venice or in a museum, wherever it may be in the West is great,” Ced’art Tamasala and Matthieu Kasiama of CATPC said as they finished installing in Venice. “But it means nothing unless we can share the benefits with our entire community, and we can create a level playing field in which we can all have access to the events that, so far, we have been excluded from.”
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In 1958, the music and fashion photographer Art Kane gathered together 57 of the most significant figures in jazz music around the stoops of 17 West 126th street in Harlem, New York. The shoot, known as “A Great Day in Harlem,” was commissioned for Esquire Magazine‘s January 1959 issue, and sitters included Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie.
Art Kane, A Great Day in Harlem (1958). © Art Kane Archive.
Forty years later, the photographer Gordon Parks paid homage to Kane’s shoot with a photograph that gathered 177 rappers and hip-hop artists on that same stoop in Harlem. Legendary figures in the photo, titled A Great Day in Hip Hop, included Busta Rhymes, Rakim, Slick Rick, Da Brat, Revered Rum, Fat Joe, and Naughty by Nature. Members of the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and the Wu-Tang Clan were also invited but did not attend.
The shoot was commissioned by hip-hop magazine XXL’s editor-in-chief Sheena Lester and became the largest gathering of musicians in a single image in history. By 1998, the front door seen in Kane’s shot had been boarded over, as had the left-hand window.
Johanna Fiore, Rev Run Arrives (1998) © Johanna Fiore.
Now, as hip-hop enters its 51st year, an installation at the rotunda of New York’s City Hall is celebrating that great day with a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the shoot. Titled “Hip Hop’s Greatest Day,” the show features shots by Jonathan Rheingold, then-publisher and co-founder of XXL, and those by the magazine’s editor Ben Osborne and Parks’s protégé, Johanna Fiore. Flyers and posters from the early days of hip-hop in New York, featuring icons from Run DMC to Salt-N-Pepa to DJ Kool Herc, are also included.
Jonathan Rheingold, Rakim (1998) © Jonathan Rheingold.
In a statement, Rheingold said he “made it a mission to identify folks who were snap­ping photos on 126th street that day and developed the largest archive of behind-the-scenes photos documenting that great day.” Parks may not have been a fan of hip-hop, he added, but “he understood the importance of this opportunity. And Sheena Lester, who was the editor-in-chief at the time, really convinced him that there was really no other photographer that one could possibly think of that would be more suitable to capture such an amazing moment than him, and he took it on.”
Jonathan Rheingold, Slick Rick (1998) © Jonathan Rheingold.
The installation is part of Rheingold’s ongoing efforts to celebrate the historical shoot, which includes a five-episode audio series, The Greatest Day, on what went into planning and engineering the photo.
“We are so thrilled to have the mayor’s office and Department of Cultural Affairs really give us a venue to share this with the rest of the city,” he said. “Hip-hop is part of the fabric of New York history, so of course it belongs in City Hall.”
“Hip Hop’s Greatest Day” is on view at City Hall Park, New York, through June 24. It can be visited by joining a public tour.
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In 1956, with Grand Central station earmarked for demolition I.M. Pei pitched New York his Hyperboloid. Ambitious would be an understatement. Designed to be nuclear bomb resistant, the 80-story tower of glass and crisscross steel would have been the world’s tallest. Alas, funding limitations and bureaucracy saw the Beaux Arts masterpiece remain untouched.
Pei’s Hyperboloid is a reminder that the unbuilt dreams of history’s great architects are often as revealing as those realized. It’s a point the first international retrospective on Pei, “Life is Architecture,” hosted by M+, Hong Kong, insists we keep in mind. Alongside the photographs and original drawings documenting Pei’s remarkable six-decade career are a series of models including those never built.
These models are woven through the six thematic areas that M+ has chosen to explore Pei’s practice. It begins with “Transcultural Foundations” that shows how Pei’s early exposure to numerous cultures helped develop his singular eye. Born in 1917 to a prosperous family in Guangzhou, China, Pei moved to Hong Kong and later Shanghai as his father climbed the ranks of the Bank of China.
I.M. Pei’s Bankers’ club drawing from undergrad project at MIT. Photo: M+.
As was customary for affluent Chinese families of the 1930s, Pei was sent abroad for study. He received an architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940 and M+ displays his final undergrad project, a banker’s club in Hong Kong, a sleek white thing that emerges from Victoria Peak and features underground squash courts and bowling lanes.
It’s a student project with future clientele firmly in mind. East Asia’s political instability, however, scuppered such plans. With the communists on the rise in China and war looming, Pei remained in America at the behest of his father studying under the founder of the Bauhaus School Walter Gropius at Harvard. In retrospect, it’s easy to see such influence on Pei’s sense of line and use of concrete, but first he had to make a living.
I.M. Pei explains his plans for Oklahoma City in 1964. Photo: The Oklahoman-USA Today Network.
Pei did so as the in-house head architect at Zeckendorf where he brought rare aesthetic attention to large public projects. Highlights included Kips Bay Plaza and Silver Towers in New York and Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia. It was an education in civic minded building and the nitty-gritty of how governmental projects are executed. Not everything succeeded. His redevelopment plan for Oklahoma City was heavy handed and failed to revitalize its downtown.
He branched out in the 1960s via I.M. Pei & Associates achieving a major breakthrough by winning the assignment of the John F. Kennedy Library. Though mired in political and planning difficulties for 15 years, in the meantime commissions rolled in, particularly museums, as detailed in M+’s “Art and Civic Form.” The Everson Museum of Art in 1968, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in 1973, and then most notably the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1978.
I.M. Pei’s design for Everson Museum of Art. Photo: M+.
One success led to the next. Pei became known for his imposing, clean-lined buildings centered on simple geometric shapes. His work in Washington D.C. impressed French president François Mitterrand, who invited Pei to redesign the Louvre’s entrance. Pei’s 70-foot glass pyramid was divisive upon its unveiling. Today, it’s a symbol of Paris.
For all his skill as an architect, Pei was equally adept at navigating client relationships. It’s the focus of “Power, Politics, and Patronage” and proved especially useful in the ‘80s when China came calling for its prodigal son. Uninspired by four decades of Soviet architecture and uninclined to erecting skyscrapers in the country’s booming metropolises, Pei largely waited (barring Fragrant Hill Hotel, which proved disappointing).
The I.M. Pei designed Suzhou Museum opened in 2006. Photo: M+.
In 2002, he began work on Suzhou Museum, his family’s hometown spanning half a millennia. The museum was a masterwork, a blend of Chinese and modernist traditions, geometry and calligraphy, light and dark.
Pei was known to say that lasting architecture must have its roots—and in Suzhou Pei had finally returned to his.
“I. M. Pei: Life is Architecture” is on view at M+ Museum, 38 Museum Drive, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong, from June 29.
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Vincent D’Onofrio stood before me with his eyes closed. His black baseball cap partially shaded his face in the dark room, lit only by the art that he and fellow actor/artist Laurence Fuller—as the duo Graphite Method—created. The visuals were projected on the walls of Lume Studios in Lower Manhattan in an April 2 performance titled “The Sparrow Experience.”
D’Onofrio spoke softly with his hands in his pockets. It was a meek appearance for an actor who once worked as a bouncer and bodyguard, whose deep voice fleshed out the art-loving villain Kingpin in Marvel’s Daredevil series, and whose presence loomed over Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), in which he played Pvt. Leonard Lawrence, his breakout role.
At times, it was difficult to sit and focus on the art. The viewer wants to watch D’Onofrio recite the poetry because he’s the actor, which distracts from the stop-motion-like vignettes on the walls around the viewer. Then, when listening to the words, it can be hard to consider his familiar voice in such a different medium.
Still, D’Onofrio’s reading of the poetry, which he often texts to Fuller from the sets of his films, is captivating and demonstrates how he earned a reputation for commanding the screen. And the poetry he and Fuller wrote is good, enhanced by the visuals, distracting thoughts aside.
Vincent D’Onofrio reciting poetry at “The Sparrow Experience.” Photo by Adam Schrader.
D’Onofrio and Fuller first connected over Twitter years ago, bonding over a shared interest in digital art. The pair officially launched their partnership at the 2023 Art Basel Miami Beach, where their joint works—digitally rendered vignettes paired with poetry written and read by D’Onofrio—were installed at an exhibition hosted by Web3 platform MakersPlace. Graphite Method’s first triptych was released as individual NFTs late last year.
Fuller and D’Onofrio describe most of Graphic Method’s poetry as “like a graphic novel” or noir thriller. There are recurring characters—a boy named Sheldon and an aging woman named Lady Bushwick—who appear in individual poems linked together by a plot, collectively titled “Sparrow.” Interspersed in last week’s performance were other poems that added texture to the overall show.

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Though D’Onofrio often writes poetry while he’s working, he said it “doesn’t have to be” related to what he is currently doing on set. He recalled filming a scene recently where “I was actually crushing somebody’s skull while I was writing [poetry]. I had blood all over my suit and hands and I had to use baby wipes to get the blood off so I could text with my finger a couple of poems.”
When asked about his poetry influences, D’Onofrio said he is “too new and raw” to the medium to know. Later in the interview, he noted there are references to Edward Hopper in his work.
“I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing. I approach it like how I start developing a character for a film. I just start from all the experience that I have acting and it just starts to form on its own. There’s no particular influence,” he said. “I write exactly how I talk, which is mostly stream-of-consciousness.”
Vincent D’Onofrio at “The Sparrow Experience.” Photo by Adam Schrader.
Meanwhile, the visuals are created using photographs of Fuller, or that Fuller took, and feeding them through the artificial intelligence model Stable Diffusion to create the painterly looks in the short videos, giving everything a feeling of nostalgia and memory. The pair also shoots video—for example, for their work Penny. The older actor even purchased his younger partner a drone to film difficult shots.
“It’s as if a painting is being influenced by words, and changing because of words, rather than rather than actors within a scene or somebody narrating over a beautiful piece of cinematography,” D’Onofrio said of Graphite Method’s visuals. “We’re using the A.I. to morph our words for us in this kind of wild way.”
“A painting is like a dream. It’s a reimagining of reality reconstructed into a dreamscape and I think that is more inviting for the imagination,” Fuller said. “I don’t think that cinematography, just as with plain photography, gives the same sort of experimental experience.” Photographs, he added, “didn’t get to my subconscious as much as a painting did.”
Laurence Fuller reciting poetry at “The Sparrow Experience.” Photo by Adam Schrader.
As for the reading itself, D’Onofrio’s recitation carried a narrative tone like watching a man relay an Oscar-bait script over a dive-bar poetry reading. The performance of the work is a second thought, he explained, but he does think about how the words will inspire the accompanying visuals, which are “playing in my head.”
“I’m trying to keep with the tone of the piece but make it as raw as I can,” D’Onofrio said. “There’s other stuff where I do straight-up poetry stuff, but I also do it more reflective.”
Fuller said their different methods are “why we complement each other so well,” noting their different cultural backgrounds. D’Onofrio came up by way of the New York theater scene, while Fuller was classically trained. “If we both approached it from the same background,” said Fuller, “it wouldn’t work.”
Laurence Fuller reciting poetry at “The Sparrow Experience.” Photo by Adam Schrader.
The collaborators’ shared acting backgrounds didn’t just heighten their performance at the exhibition. To Fuller, such performances also lend new dimensions to the art of acting.
“In our time, actors are often overlooked as artists, and the craft of acting itself is sort of on this precipice of plunging into an abyss of social media and garbage. To honor the craft in the context of art history has barely been done at all,” Fuller said. Still, he points to Matthew Barney’s six-hour-long art video River of Fundament (2014), starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Paul Giamatti, as an example when actors have been “welcomed into the canon of art history.”
D’Onofrio, for his part, said his collaboration with Fuller is just getting started: “One of the things I like about working with Laurence is that I’m open to anything that Laurence gives me.”
“The last thing that I want to do is claim to know what I’m doing,” he said. “All I’m doing is writing and collaborating with another artist and we’re just putting stuff out.”
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They’re the team known for viral sensations—cartoonish big red rubber boots based on an anime character; an ATM that publicly displays the bank balance of all those who use it, in the manner of a video game; and Nike Air Jordan Max 97 sneakers that contain a drop of holy water from the River Jordan. Now, the collective MSCHF—call them artists, call them a start-up, call them Internet pranksters, but definitely call them “mischief”—has trained its penetrating gaze on New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they have secretly replaced the handles, water lines, and other parts of a bathroom sink, right under the staff’s noses.
In an Instagram Reel, disguised voices coming from pixelated faces discuss the… performance? Robbery? Stunt? “I think we should do the Met,” said one. “You want to steal some art?” responded another. “No. I want to steal a sink.” They specify that before absconding with pieces of the plumbing, they’re replacing them with better parts, so it does seem like a victimless crime, if not even a favor. If guards come, they figure, they’ll just say they’re plumbers. And anyway, if they get busted, they asked, “What’s changed?”
The piece, while ultra-modern in its readiness for social-media virality, actually refers to an ancient thought experiment. It’s called Met’s Sink of Theseus (2024) in reference to the Ship of Theseus, or Theseus’s Paradox, which asks whether an object that has had all its parts replaced is still essentially the same object. 
Still from a MSCHF Instagram reel.
Met’s Sink of Theseus appears in “Art 2,” the collective’s new show at Perrotin’s Los Angeles outpost, where it is displayed fully reassembled, with clear plastic replacing the porcelain basin (which they did not steal).
There were several factors that made the Met and a sink the perfect targets, said the collective’s Kevin Wiesner and Lukas Bentel on a FaceTime call while installing the show. 
“They’re one of those institutions that has such cachet that anything that goes in or out of there gains in value,” said Wiesner. “It’s the same sink as you can find in who knows how many other buildings in New York. But we now have work in the Met Museum.”
They also have an odd popular appeal, he added: “Weirdly, the bathrooms are fairly well-documented by celebrities who attend the Met Gala and go to the bathrooms to take photos.”
And, Bentel added, the disassembled-and-reassembled nature of the piece recalls certain artifacts in the museum’s collection. “There are a lot of artworks in that museum that were taken from various places and then assembled there,” he said.
The mini-heist comes at a moment when museums are under serious scrutiny for their security practices. The British Museum recently has seen hundreds of objects stolen, and a wave of thefts of Chinese antiquities at Western museums has given rise to speculation that the Chinese government may be resorting to rogue practices to get the objects repatriated. MSCHF’s members were definitely concerned about Met security, though. “There were a number of stressful moments,” Bentel said. “Not to get into too much detail, but there were a number of times when we thought it would go not well for us.”
The museum declined to comment. 
The prank takes its a place in a century-long tradition of plumbing, sinks, and toilets as art. Marcel Duchamp’s first readymade, Fountain (1917), was a urinal turned on its side. Robert Gober’s 1980s sink sculptures, missing all the functional fixtures, lent uncanny bodily associations to these domestic basins. In 2016, Maurizio Cattelan installed a golden toilet, straightforwardly titled America, at the Guggenheim Museum, and a 2018–19 public art installation in New York’s Madison Square by Arlene Schechet was inspired by a residency at a toilet and sink factory.
Referring to this long line of bathroom art, Bentel joked, “At one point we hope to assemble the whole set.”
“I don’t know if it’s the oldest sink in the museum,” Wiesner said. “Some have been converted and updated, whereas this one is from the early 1900s and has all stock parts that are very easy to find and replace.” They declined to say exactly which bathroom the replaced sink is in, but they did let on that it’s closer to the Temple of Dendur (certainly one of those specimens that was brought to the museum piece by piece) than not.
MSCHF, Public Universal Car (2022). Courtesy of MSCHF and Perrotin.
The new show treats the theme of second acts. It also features works like Public Universal Car, a 2004 Chrysler PT Cruiser that allowed thousands of people nationwide to access a single vehicle with duplicate keys. Another piece consists of 250 identical small wooden sculptures of fish hanging on a wall; one of them is a Picasso work, raising the question of whether a single collector will buy up the whole “school” or whether various buyers will try to pick the “right” one. 
MSCHF, Botched Painting (Ecole Siennoise, fin du XVIIe siècle Vierge à l’enfant terrassant le dragon), 2023. Courtesy of MSCHF and Perrotin.
Another group of works refers to 2012’s viral “Beast Jesus,” which came into being when a well-meaning amateur Spanish artist tried to restore a painting at her church, with results that were an aesthetic disaster but tourism gold. MSCHF bought a handful of antique religious paintings and hamfistedly “restored” them, with the question of whether, they, too, could increase their value (a bit like the parts of the Met sink).
MSCHF, Microscopic Handbag (Hermes), 2024. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of MSCHF and Perrotin.
Parodying fashion drops is Microscopic Handbags, consisting of 3D-printed accessories that are visible only under a microscope, recalling the ancient Indian fable of the weavers who deceive a ruler by giving him a robe that supposedly is visible only to those worthy of seeing it. When he models his imaginary finery, a child calls out, “the emperor has no clothes.” 
Speaking of clothes, Wiesner and Bentel admitted that, in their artist duds on FaceTime, they didn’t exactly look like plumbers, raising the question of how they passed. They declined to say who exactly visited the museum, not wanting to expose any individual to liability (perhaps the same reason the faces and voices are disguised in the Instagram video though the members’ identities are known).
They did seem to fool some people, though, said Bentel. “Visitors would come out of the stall and say, ‘I don’t want to make more work for you, but the toilet is really leaking in there.’”
“Art 2” is on view at Perrotin, 5036 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, through June 1, 2024.
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Japan’s oldest public art museum had grand plans for its 90th anniversary celebrations. It wanted to host a Takashi Murakami exhibition. It was less keen, however, on paying the shipping costs and insurance premiums associated with schlepping Murakami’s work from Europe and North America.
Its solution was to invite the superstar Japanese artist to create an entirely new body of work, one that riffed off Kyoto’s past, present, and future. After all, the museum argued, despite Murakami’s international reach, his studio was Tokyo-based, and at age 62, he was still relatively young and up to the task.
View of the entrance to “Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto.” Photo: Kozo Takayama/Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.
The pitch came from Shinya Takahashi, Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art’s general manager, who boasts a long and fruitful relationship with the artist. Murakami obliged and result is “Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto,” set to run through Sept 1, an exhibition of more than 170 works, the vast majority of which are new.
So new, in fact, some are unfinished. Inside the show, there’s a notice informing visitors that works will be updated over the course of the exhibition’s run by Murakami and his assistants.
Installation view of Rakuchu Rakugai Zu Matabei Iwasa Rip by Takashi Murakami at “Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto” at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art. Photo: Kozo Takayama/Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.
Two works that are neither new nor unfinished are the pair of 14-foot statues that visitors encounter at the exhibition’s entrance: Embodiment of “A” and Embodiment of “Um.” The ghoulish, club-clutching twins are guardians, the likes of which tradition says should be called upon in times of misfortune. Murakami created them in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, placing them on multicolored plinths, as though pieces for a giant board game.
Murakami has forever smashed together traditional and modern here he does so in the context of his host city. For much of Japan’s Edo period, 1603 to 1868, Kyoto was the nation’s cultural heart, a wellspring of painting, architecture, and the performing arts.
Installation view of “Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto” at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art. Photo: Kozo Takayama/Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.
The centerpiece of this conversation is perhaps Rakuchu Rakugai Zu, a 43-foot long reimagining of Iwasa Matabei’s Scenes In and Around Kyoto. The 17th-century painting presents a city shrouded in golden clouds out of which everyday scenes emerge—a man sells melons, a shrine festival takes place, women go shopping. Murakami reimagines the original, apparently with planning help from A.I., and sprinkles on his own icons.
Another turn to Kyoto’s painting tradition comes with Murakami’s presentation of Wind God and Thunder God. The pair were tackled by many of the Edo period’s finest painters and Murakami follows the playfulness of Ogata Korin’s celebrated work (now housed in Tokyo National Museum) and fills it with characteristic color and whimsy.
Installation view of Murakami’s sculptures “Kaikai” and “Kiki” at “Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto” at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art. Photo: Kozo Takayama/Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.
For all that’s new, there’s plenty that serves as a reminder, or introduction, to the faces and figures around which Murakami has built his brand over the past two decades. There are sculptures of Kaikai and Kiki, his green-eyed, jaw-agape monsters. A technicolored Mr. DOB, supposedly his answer to Mickey Mouse, made in 1993. Outside, in the pond of the museum’s garden, he’s installed a giant golden Flower Parent and Child.
There have always been murmurs that Murakami remains an artist who is better appreciated abroad than at home. This is the artist’s first exhibition in the country eight years, though contrary to the museum’s claims, it seems unlikely to be his last.
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