[STARS Exhibition] Museum Goods by Each of the Six Artists — Including Limited Editions!

STARS: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World

The STARS exhibition was originally planned to coincide with the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic it opened on a shifted schedule.

The show selects six artists who have transcended the Japanese frame to earn today an international reputation across regions and generations, and traces the arc of their practice by connecting early and most recent works.

Museum Goods

Not to be missed at STARS is the original merchandise the featured artists have created specifically for the exhibition.
Available only to ticket-holders, the items are on sale at the Mori Art Museum’s museum shop.

Must-have items for fans will appear on shelves throughout the run of the exhibition.
More will arrive one after another; in this article we introduce a selection.

Below, item by item, artist by artist.

Yayoi Kusama

A square plate laid out with the image of While Waiting for Love, the Herd of Women Are Always Left by the Men (2009), a work shown in this exhibition and drawn from Yayoi Kusama’s most recent painting series, My Eternal Soul. It is a bone china piece of a soft, pure white and beautifully translucent finish.

Lee Ufan

A bone china mug of beautifully rounded form, laid out with the motif Ikkyu drawn by Lee Ufan expressly for this mug — a special edition carrying the sentiment of “taking a break with mug in hand.”

Tatsuo Miyajima

Tatsuo Miyajima is known for works using LED digital counters that step through the numbers 1 to 9; his original goods for the show are glasses scattered with digital numerals. When water is poured in, the numbers change color, revealing themselves in two hues — green and blue.

 

Takashi Murakami

A “STARS”-original kokeshi doll produced in collaboration between Takashi Murakami and “Usaburo Kokeshi,” a workshop nestled in a village at the eastern foot of Mount Haruna. It draws inspiration from Cherry Blossoms Fujiyama JAPAN (2020) — the roughly 20-meter-wide new large-scale painting made for this exhibition.

Yoshitomo Nara

Jigsaw puzzles featuring the new painting Miss Moonlight (2020) made for this exhibition and the image of The Little Star Dweller (2006)*. Each has 1,000 solid pieces. Piecing them together, you can enjoy both the puzzle-building itself and the calm expression of the girls Yoshitomo Nara paints emerging bit by bit.
*Not shown in this exhibition.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

An umbrella whose striking image is a flash cutting across a pitch-black night sky. It takes as its motif works from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields series*, created by artificially generating flashes of lightning and discharging them onto photographic dry plates.
*Not shown in this exhibition.

 

Official Catalogue

The official catalogue is richly illustrated with newly shot photography — including the new works and installation views on display — and also carries short essays on each of the six artists, along with critical texts by Mami Kataoka, Fumio Nanjo, and Alexandra Munroe.

Size: A4 variant (28.2×21 cm) Pages: 312 (provisional) Price: 3,300 yen (tax incl.)

 

Overview

STARS: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World

Venue: Mori Art Museum
Dates: Friday, July 31, 2020 – Sunday, January 3, 2021
Hours: 10:00 – 22:00 (last admission 21:30) ※Tuesdays only, until 17:00 (last admission 16:30)
※However, September 22 (Tue, holiday) and November 3 (Tue, holiday) are open until 22:00 (last admission 21:30)
Admission: Adults 2,000 yen; Students (high school and university) 1,300 yen; Children (ages 4 to junior high) 700 yen; Seniors (65 and over) 1,700 yen

Participating artists ※In alphabetical order by surname: Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan, Tatsuo Miyajima, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Hiroshi Sugimoto