With inspiration from traditional Japanese culture, science fiction, anime and pop culture, Murakami's oeuvre includes paintings, sculptures, films and a stream of commercial products populated by mutant characters of his own creation. His iconoclastic individualism continues the maverick legacy of the Edo Eccentrics, a group of eighteenth-century Japanese artists who constructed a powerfully imaginative world filled with bizarre and emotional imagery.
The title of the exhibit open at Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills through April 13, comes from the Buddhist Hannya Shingyo (Heart Sutra), a popular sutra in Mahayana Buddhism. The incantation is often chanted by Zen groups before or after a meditation. At the sutra's conclusion, the Avalokiteshvara, a popular and recognizable bodhisattva, turns around and recites a mysterious mantra to one of the disciples. The mantra is often roughly translated as "gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, enlightenment, svāhā". This articulation has been interpreted differently as a call to "go" to attain enlightenment, as the cry of a child reborn in an eternal true and cursed world.
GYATEI² reveals a myriad of variations of interconnected images, each permutation and combination generating a new meaning. Murakami's first character, Mr. DOB – a whimsical, sharp-toothed Mickey character – reappears in different guises, as does the ubiquitous Rainbow Flower. Elsewhere, images of doors, graffiti of the word “viral” and a self-portrait of the artist and his dog are superimposed on dense graphic patterns. A statue of Flower Parent and Child (2019), cast in bronze and covered in gold leaf, stands to a height of six meters and displays a huge flower character with its flowering offspring. Similarly, rabbit-like Kaikai and smiling Kiki (three-eyed) smiling (both 2019) are rendered in cast bronze covered in platinum leaf, the likable yet imposing characters illustrating Murakami's interest in paradox, as kikikaikai describes something that is dangerous but attractive.
The Qinghua (seventeen panels) (2019) reinterprets a motif originally painted on a vase from China's Yuan Dynasty (c. 1206-1368), whose imagery mingled Murakami's memory with childhood riverside trips with his father, where anglers could haul in huge carp. At nearly eight feet high and fifty-eight feet wide, the image progresses panel by panel, like a huge storyboard, or a vase that has been unrolled as one long scroll along the gallery walls.
