By the time Takashi Murakami received his Ph.D. from the University of Nihonga, in 1993, he had plenty to say about the state of contemporary art in Japan. “It’s a deep appropriation of Western trends,” he stated. Much of his own work aimed to satirize and provoke. For instance, in the mid–1990s, Murakami created a sculpture of a naked anime character with spiky blond hair and a rope of semen looping around him. Titled My Lonesome Cowboy, the piece drew attention, not always positive. Then came Murakami’s “Superflat Manifesto” and his embrace of popular culture. This exhibition centers on three pivotal events addressed by Murakami: the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the March 11, 2011, earthquake in Tōhoku (which triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster); and the coronavirus pandemic. Shared trauma reimagined and transformed. —Elena Clavarino