Dragon in Clouds—Red Mutation (Takashi Murakami, 2010)

Dragon in Clouds—Red Mutation: The version I painted myself in annoyance after Professor Tsuji told me, “Why don’t’ you paint something yourself for once?” 雲竜赤変図：辻惟雄先生に「あなた、たまには自分で描いたらどうなの？」と嫌味を言われて腹が立って自分で描いたバージョン The MFA’ s Dragon in Clouds (1763) by Soga Shōhaku, on view in the adjoining space, has long been a looming presence in Murakami’s artistic imagination. Early in his career, he saw the painting reproduced in Nobuo Tsuji’s Lineage of Eccentrics, a book that was to provide him with a framework for conceptualizing his own artwork. Many years later, in 2010, Tsuji offered up Shōhaku’s dragon as the focus for an artistic response by Murakami. The resulting Red Dragon represents the 6th of twenty-one works now known as Battle Royale!—a series of “jousts” between artist and revered scholar, constituting a spirited repartee of art production and criticism. As the full title of the painting reflects, Murakami found himself “backed into a corner.” While he struggled, he also ruminated on a number of images, including the watercolor by the English artist and poet William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. The picture had also figured in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, part of a series of books that included the Silence of the Lambs; a serial killer, obsessed with the watercolor, schemes to devour it. When Murakami finally had the fortitude to take on the challenge, he completed his interpretation of Shōhaku’s thirty-foot masterpieces within a twe