Takashi Murakami: JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige

This oversize poster featuring Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered—Suido Bridge and Surugadai (2024–25) was produced in 2025, in conjunction with Takashi Murakami: JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. The exhibition juxtaposed 121 canvases that Murakami produced in response to 100 Famous Views of Edo (1856–58), a series of ukiyo-e prints by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), with his interpretations of paintings by European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists identified with the nineteenth-century tendency known as Japonisme.

The reproduced work is Murakami’s take on Hiroshige’s view of an area of samurai households in Edo, Japan, during the Boy’s Festival, the fifth day of the fifth month. The carp-shaped banners and streamers were produced in imitation of military displays and refer to the Chinese legend of a fish with the strength to leap up a waterfall, an image considered appropriate for children.