EVENT: THE HOUSE OF PIKACHU: ART, ANIME, AND POP CULTURE (OCTOBER 17 2025–MARCH 15 2026, HUSTON, TEXAS)
The house of Pikachu: art, anime, and pop culture
17 October 2025 – 15 March 2026
Curated by Owen Duffy (Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions)
Asia Society Texas Center, 1370 Southmore Blvd, Houston, TX 77004
Wed, Fri–Sun 10am–5pm; Thu 12–7pm. General admission $8; free for ages 6 and under, students with ID, and AST members; free on Thursdays.
Opening reception: 17 October 2025, 6–8pm
Asia Society Texas opens The house of Pikachu: art, anime, and pop culture today, a broad survey of how anime aesthetics circulate through contemporary art—flat planes, saturated palettes, stylised faces, and iconography that migrated from TV, manga, and game screens into galleries. The show runs through 15 March 2026.
Nearly two decades after museums first framed anime as a resource for a new pop sensibility, this exhibition widens the lens geographically and generationally. Twenty-five artists from Japan, Brazil, China, Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire, the U.S. (with a strong Houston contingent), and beyond are included, evidence of how thoroughly anime has gone global.
The game art genealogies are clear: Yoshitaka Amano’s Time and Light anchors the historical thread from Speed Racer to Final Fantasy, bridging animation and videogame visualities. Houston-based Gao Hang contributes a new Pikachu painting that riffs on 1990s game vernacular, pixel-era futurism rendered as big, bright painting.
And Monsieur Zohore’s Houston, We Have a Problem (2025) is a delirious crossover in which figures from Akira, Dragon Ball Z, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, Gurren Lagann, and Neon Genesis Evangelion collide, stressing fandom as a method of art-making rather than a mere theme.
The galleries thread familiar touchstones, including Astro Boy, Dragon Ball, Ultraman, Sailor Moon, and a full-tilt homage to Pikachu, with works that push well past kawaii toward the eerie, the supernatural, the otherworldly. If pop art once sampled advertising and comics, The house of Pikachu suggests that twenty-first-century pop draws just as much from platform cultures, fan practices, and the visual logics of games.
Featured artists: Yoshitaka Amano, Chiho Aoshima, Daniel Arsham, Emily Yong Beck, Katherine Bernhardt, Julien Ceccaldi, CFGNY, Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, Maya Fuji, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Gao Hang, Loc Huynh, Teppei Kaneuji, Izumi Kato, Taylor Lee, Jarod Lew, Ileana Moreno, Yoshitomo Nara, Robert Nava, Otani Workshop, Rozeal., Keiichi Tanaami, Andrew Norman Wilson, Yuli Yamagata, Monsieur Zohore.
