“Takeda Hideo’s Genpei is striking because it is a sharp, sometimes irreverent critique that  challenges long-standing assumptions about the authority of Japanese history as it is usually  presented,” said Kit Brooks, Curator of Asian Art, Princeton University Art Museum. “Takeda recasts this romanticized war epic as something far more unstable and human, exposing the  absurdity, violence, and self-absorbed motives at its core while reflecting the social and  political currents of late twentieth-century Japan.” 

The artist disrupts the typical portrayal of episodes from the Genpei War both through the stories he selected for his series and by how he treated the narratives being pictured. For  example, in works such as The Mark of the Fan, Takeda transforms a celebrated moment of  martial skill into a visually unsettling composition in which a lone warrior advances through a  sea of submerged, tattooed bodies. Elsewhere, figures from the epic are rendered in a  satirical fashion: the legendary general Yoshitsune, for example, is depicted with grotesque  and irreverent imagery that undermines the idealized masculinity of the samurai class. In  another scene, the warlord Taira no Kiyomori appears tormented by demonic forces in a  feverish vision of guilt and excess. Takeda’s use of full-body tattoo motifs—an anachronistic  element influenced by associations with Japan’s modern criminal underworld—recasts the  Genpei War as a conflict between rival gangs rather than a noble clash of warrior elites. Through these choices, the artist exposes the constructed nature of historical narratives and  critiques the romanticization of violence and power. 

The exhibition also situates Takeda’s practice within broader artistic and political  developments in postwar Japan. Trained at Tama Art University in the early 1970s during a period shaped by student protest movements and social upheaval, Takeda developed a visual language rooted in satire, economy of form, and graphic immediacy. His work as a  political cartoonist, as well as his engagement with poster design, informs the bold formal clarity and subversive humor of the Genpei series. 

Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority is curated by Kit Brooks, curator of Asian art at the  Princeton University Art Museum. An accompanying book—the first to be published on the  artist in English in several decades—features a major new essay on the artist written by Brooks, an interview with the artist, and an essay by Elizabeth Oyler, a specialist in The Tale of the  Heike and noh performance, examining the reinterpretations of the epic from its earliest  incarnations into the present.