CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/1/2018

'Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics' is here at last!

This detail of Takashi Murakami's almost 10x20 foot painting, "Lots, Lots of Kaikai and Kiki" (2009), is reproduced from MFA Publications' new Takashi Murakami exhibition catalog, Lineage of Eccentrics, pairing Murakami's super-contemporary pop art with historical Japanese works from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's collection. Murakami derived the names of the characters in this painting from the expression kaikaikiki, meaning "dangerous yet appealing" when originally used to describe works by sixteenth-century master, Kano Eitoku. "However, when the syllables are transposed they describe a supernatural atmosphere inhabited by ghosts and other phenomena," Anne Nishimura Morse writes, "Thus, Murakami found that the term suggested an image in concert with his own art and adopted it for the name of his company in 2001."