Japanese artist Takashi Murakami debuts Ohio museum exhibit featuring over 100 pieces

Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami has always worked in many different forms—paintings, sculptures, designer fashion items with brands like Louis Vuitton, album covers, and even special merchandise with Major League Baseball.

Now, he’s bringing colorful portraits to a U.S. museum. His show, “Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” opens Sunday at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibit, which was first displayed in Los Angeles, includes over 100 artworks in many styles.

Murakami, famous for his smiling, rainbow-colored flower design, said he mixes fun themes with serious historical events that caused emotional pain.

Ed Schad, a curator at The Broad museum in Los Angeles, said the art looks at how trauma affects people and society. The portraits show “what a society is doing, how healthy a society is, what a society is responding to,” he explained. In this exhibit, that main response is trauma.

One sculpture shows Murakami and his dog, half of their bodies peeled back to reveal bones and organs, while the other half shows their normal outside look. The work, titled Pom and Me, reflects Murakami’s view of Western culture seen through his Japanese background.

One wall in the exhibit displays square portraits of cartoon-like flowers, each with a different emotion and expression. They are arranged by background color to form a rainbow. Some flowers are crying, one looks like a zombie, another has blood at its mouth, and one is watching fireworks with awe.

There aren’t direct images of historical tragedies, but the museum said viewers might think of three major moments in Japanese history while looking at the art: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Murakami said people often misunderstand his work as simple and popular.

“But this is okay because this is one of my tricks,” he said.

What children enjoy in his art, he said, might be very different from what adults notice and appreciate.

Before entering the main gallery, visitors pass through a version of Yumedono, a building from the Horyuji Temple in Nara, Japan. Murakami said the idea came to him after watching the 2024 TV series “Shōgun.”

Inside this structure are four recent paintings: Blue Dragon Kyoto, Vermillion Bird Kyoto, White Tiger Kyoto, and Black Tortoise Kyoto, created between 2023 and 2025.