A 28-foot-high, sweet-faced Buddha named Tongari-kun, which actually means “Mr. Pointy” in Japanese, was installed at New York’s Rockefeller Center recently as the centerpiece of an immense and fanciful work by famed sculptor Takashi Murakami called Reversed Double Helix.
One of the more ambitious and fantastical outdoor sculptures in the city’s history, this mind-spinning creation also involves four comparatively diminutive guards who appear to be standing on hats and carrying long lollipops, a surrounding set of wildly colorful mushroom seats and benches, and two giant balloons, each 33 feet in diameter and covered with eyeballs, floating over the whole.
Murakami, who also does work with designer Marc Jacobs and the Louis Vuitton fashion house, was trained in the traditional nihon-ga Japanese style of painting, but has pursued his own muse in creating these magical figures of Japanese animism.
