Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles In the Darkness of His Mind

Takashi Murakami... Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles In the Darkness of His Mind (Installation video) at Gagosian Gallery. "...In this new work, Murakami depicts the legend of the Karajishi or "China-lion", the mythological animal that guards the thresholds of Japanese Buddhist temples, separating sacred precincts from secular areas, averting evil, and promoting happiness and joy. Representations of lions were produced first by Chinese, and then Japanese, artists based on versions from India and Assyria that had been assimilated into Buddhist iconography, without the real animal ever having been seen. Thus these depictions of the exotic animal became increasingly fanciful. The Karajishi was a chosen subject of Shohaku Soga (1730-1781), the prominent iconoclast who mixed Zen and Chinese styles with wilder, virtuoso brushwork and equal measures of irreverent wit and inventiveness and whose interpretations of the Zen Buddhist ascetic Daruma, another famous outsider, were a key inspiration for Murakami's 2007 series."