Imagine a world of monsters: cute and scary monsters, monsters in paintings and sculpture, monsters that reflect our technologically driven, post-pandemic anxieties. At the Akiko Yamazaki & Jerry Yang Pavilion at the Asian Art Museum, such creatures are unleashed in all their glory and strangeness, creating a world that spans the gamut from hell deities and tentacled beasts to 12-foot-tall smiling flowers.

These monsters herald that Takashi Murakami has arrived in San Francisco.

The globally influential Japanese artist’s first solo show in the Bay Area, “Takashi Murakami: Unfamiliar People — Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego” (on view through Feb. 12) is a major get for the Asian Art Museum, owed to Murakami’s relationship with the museum’s senior curator of Japanese art, Laura Allen.

Perhaps most famous for his monster imagery, inspired by a museum visit at age 8 to see Goya’s horrific painting “Saturn Devouring His Son,” the 61-year-old Murakami has explored disciplines including painting, sculpture, installation and, more recently, NFTs.

Influenced by both traditional Japanese art and techniques as well as contemporary media like manga and anime, his career has also included both fine art and commercial undertakings, like his cult 2003 accessories collection with Louis Vuitton, a sculpture collaboration with musician Pharrell Williams and the production of the McG music video “Akihabara Majokko Princess.” Few other artists working today can claim his reach or pop culture prominence.

With Murakami’s international fandom, the exhibition, currated by Allen, has enormous expectations to live up to, but rises to the challenge. More than 75 works are on view, a dozen of which are making their public debut. “Unfamiliar People” shows Murakami in all his contradictions and complexities: creepy, funny, lighthearted, utterly serious.

Works like the painting “727” from 1996 — which shows his signature monster character, Mr. Dob, swooping into a 12th-century Japanese scroll, disrupting the serenity — embody those tensions. The 2016 painting “Red Demon and Blue Demon with 48 Arhats” shows cartoonish, muscular monsters that reference bothNioguardians standing at Buddhist temple gates and also the hornedoniof Japanese legend.

More recent paintings inspired by blue and white Qinghua porcelain from 2019 hew closer to tradition, rendering botanical elements and carp in a style nearly identical to those on the original pottery. The 2023 painting “Lidded Jar with Design of a Lotus Pond” quite literally depicts a Chinese Ming Dynasty piece in the museum’s own collection.

After nearly 40 years in the public eye, Murakami has come to both embody certain Japanese aesthetics and to push back against cultural assumptions.

“We tend to have this divided view of what we think of as being Japanese,” said Allen, who noted that Murakami’s practice has always involved a certain degree of artistic sampling. “There are a lot of people who really cherish that kind of traditionalwabi-sabiaesthetic and might recoil from these more graphic and colorful images as being representative of Japan. But, in fact, there’s always been more than two sides to Japanese tastes.”

In person, Murakami embodies the more optimistic side of his art. He dresses with chic whimsy, and his gray beard, flowing black hair and round, rimless glasses make him as recognizable in his art as his monsters, as with the 2014 platinum leaf and carbon fiber sculpture, “Invoking the Vitality of the Universe Beyond Imagination.” At the museum’s gala in his honor on Wednesday, Sept. 13, he accessorized his tuxedo with monster and flower necklaces of his own design and a rainbow octopus hat.

在一次采访中(使用翻译的帮助), Murakami told the Chronicle the genesis of the show came seven years ago, when he visited the Google campus in Mountain View and considered opening a gallery in the Bay Area. He met Allen on that trip, and returned in 2019 to visit the museum. While the show was already in process during the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns in 2020, the global crisis inspired both the title works and others on view. Seeing his children’s obsessions with video games like “Animal Crossing” and with the Metaverse sparked both Murakami’s fears and creativity, as well as his desire to enter the digital space.

“This exhibition came together from my observations of the world for the past four or five years,” said Murakami. “In the beginning of my career, there weren’t too many people or too many works that were explaining or were bringing in Japanese anime or gaming imagery into the art industry. I was really trying to explain those things in my artwork, but now people are more educated. Now I can go further and dig deeper into that and just go directly into the kind of expression that I want to do.”

The show’s title, “Unfamiliar People,” comes from one of Murakami’s 2022 paintings responding to society’s immersion in cyberspace and how people became “monsterized” by pandemic isolation and the cycles of egotism and the attention-seeking endemic of social media. It shows four primary monster figures surrounded by smaller ones, their faces seemingly dumb with electronic stimulation. Other paintings from the “Unfamiliar People” series like “A Blond Woman” and “A Young Auctioneer” riff on social media avatars by monsterizing influencer-like figures.

Past the sculptures of cuddly and creepy monsters, viewers are confronted by what Allen calls Murakami’s late career masterpiece: “Judgment Day.” The 83-foot long painting depicts Emma-ō, the king of hell, surrounded by figures and motifs from Japan’s 19th-century Edo period. References to centuries of Japanese art, history and myth appear throughout the work, further exemplifying Murakami’s bridging of past and present, east and west and exploration of the darker human themes to have emerged from the pandemic.

“Judgment Day” is the kind of work that requires repeated viewings to fully appreciate its complexities. The same is true of the exhibition as a whole. Once you get past the spectacle and vibrancy of Murakami’s monsters, the exhibition’s ruminations on digital culture not only feel right for the Bay Area, but like a meaningful reflection of the times.

“I’m not sure about my own future, but I’m constantly feeling the gap between where I am and what (my children’s) interests are for the next generation,” said Murakami. “I’m trying to fill those gaps all the time, so when you look at my sculptures and the resulting paintings, maybe that’s the gap I’m trying to fill, and to draw on people’s empathy.”

Reach Tony Bravo:tbravo@sfchronicle.com