A fan of manga and anime as a child, Takashi Murakami hoped to work in the animation industry. While at the Tokyo University of the Arts, however, he found himself drawn to Nihonga, a time-honored style of painting on silk or paper. After graduation, Murakami began playing with the boundary between high and low art, embedding contemporary iconography within traditional Japanese forms. Some of his best-known motifs—skulls, smiling flower faces, and a cartoonish figure called Mr. DOB—appear in his new series of paintings, which recreate tableaux from Japanese history. Merging the contemporary and the classical, Murakami combines his sketches with A.I.-generated imagery. —Paulina Prosnitz