A large-scale solo exhibition of works by Takashi Murakami (b. 1962), an artist at the forefront of contemporary art, will be held at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art as it celebrates its 90th anniversary. For Murakami, who has developed his career primarily overseas, this will be his first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan in about eight years and his first outside of Tokyo. The exhibition “Superflat” curated and organized by Takashi Murakami toured Japan and the U.S. from 2000 to 2001, and together with the Superflat Manifesto that accompanied it, had a significant impact on the contemporary art scene. The concept not only linked traditional Japanese pictorial expressions with popular contemporary culture represented by anime, manga, and video games, but also considered the sensibility and social aspects of the Japanese people in the postwar period, as well as the capitalist economy, politics, and religion on a flattened plane. By using diverse methods to incorporate this concept into his overall creative process, Murakami has come to create a wide range of works that question the value and essential meaning of art. His career can be seen as an ongoing effort to challenge the international art scene, in which the Western values have become the accepted norm, providing new stimulus from a uniquely Japanese perspective. The exhibition takes place In Kyoto, the city that was a center of activity for Edo period painters in which Murakami has deeply been interested since the beginning of his career, a place where diverse forms of art and performing arts are still very much alive and intermingle. Please look forward to encountering a new world of Murakami in “Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto,” an exhibition comprising around 170 predominantly new works including newly painted masterpieces, representative series, and works that will be exhibited for the first time in Japan.