“Takashi Murakami: Unfamiliar People — Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego”is the first of three exhibitions opening in the Bay Area this fall featuring acclaimed Japanese artists and art of great significance in Japanese culture.

In October “Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love” will explore the 94-year-old artist and international celebrity dubbed the “princess of polka dots”。展览将有多个镜像”Infinity Rooms” by Kusama, including her latest work, “Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love” and her 2013 installation “Love Is Calling.”

This is the artist’s first solo show in Northern California. The exhibition will be overseen by assistant curator of media arts Tanya Zimbardo. Like Murakami, Kusama has explored commercial collaborations in addition to fine art, including a partnership with Louis Vuitton.

Come November, the Asian Art Museum will debut “The Heart of Zen,” featuring “Persimmons” and “Chestnuts,” two 13th century paintings by Chinese monk Muqi that are seen as highly influential in Japanese painting and have rarely left the Daitokuji Ryokoin Zen temple in Kyoto since the 16th century. In medieval and early modern Japan, Muqi came to define Chinese-style painting (kara-e) and was regarded so highly that the term “priest’s style” (oshō-yō) was coined to describe his masterful mode of brushwork.

“The Heart of Zen,” the Asian Art Museum’s senior curator of Japanese art Laura Allen noted, was conceived when Ryokoin temple abbot Kobori Geppo visited the Asian Art Museum in 2017. To protect the paintings from overexposure to light, “Persimmons” and “Chestnuts” will be presented individually for only three weeks each. There will be one weekend where both are on display.

Asian Art Museum director Jay Xu called autumn an unprecedented moment for Japanese art in San Francisco.

“The Bay Area has always had a close cultural relationship with Japan,” said Xu. “From incredible painters who redefined how we look at nature, like Chiura Obata in Yosemite, to the Beats studying Zen in the 1950s, to the foods we eat every day, and now to global icons like Murakami, who’s thinking hard about the complexities of the digital age.”

Reach Tony Bravo: tbravo@sfchronicle.com