727-272 (The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate) is a site-specific work commissioned to the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami for this room of Palazzo Grassi. One of the most celebrated Pop artists to emerge in the East during the last few decades, Murakami worked on this masterpiece for about three years. The painting is a reinterpretation of works by some of the past masters of Japanese art; these have long been a source of inspiration for Murakami, who combines the narrative and compositional techniques of traditional Japanese painting with the modern style of manga comics. The starting-point for this pictorial narrative is the central figure of “Mr Dob”; a sort of alter ego of Murakami himself, this character is depicted with a typically manga-style face, a sly smile and three eyes that seem to look far into the distance. The narrative starts on the right, with the flow of colour – comparable to that one finds in Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings – bringing us to the second figure of the work. This is an old wise man inspired by the legendary Chinese emperor Shennong, who lived around 2700 BC. Considered the deity of Agriculture – his name actually means “heavenly peasant” – Shennong would invent the plough and teach his people how to cultivate wheat and cereal crops. He is also celebrated as a deity of Medicine: according to legend, he would test hundreds of herbs to evaluate their curative properties; if of beneficial properties, the herb was said to light up his stomach – which was transparent – if harmful, it would blacken it. This is the role in which Murakami depicts Shennong, with a blade of grass in his mouth. On the far right of the work a large smiling lion emerges from an arch made of skulls; this is an image taken from Stone Bridge at Mt. Tiantai by Sakaki Hyakusen, an eighteenth-century Japanese artist. In Chinese and, later, Japanese mythology, the lion was the animal that stood guard over the threshold of Buddhist temples, a good luck figure that kept misfortune at bay. And it is a process of ‘re-invention’ that Murakami follows in his own image of the imposing custodian, adding a few stylistic details. Finally, on the first three panels to the left, one finds another depiction inspired by the past: the tornado is drawn from Transcendent Attacking a Whirlwind by the eighteenth-century Japanese painter Soga Shohauku. Murakami’s majestic work is a reflection upon the nature of the human soul and the transcendence of being; upon the importance of the indissoluble links between ancient and modern, past and present. Such a bond between the old and new is one of the keystones of Murakami’s poetics.

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