Takashi Murakami

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Born: 1962

Summary of Takashi Murakami

Known for its brilliantly coloured and maniacally happy works, the meteoric emergence of Takashi Murakamí into the world of modern art was equally celebrated and criticised. Murakami combines Japanese mass culture with the rich creative heritage of the nation and eliminates any difference between commodities and high art. In comparison with Andy Warhol, he has both his art-as-business strategy and his huge manufacturing facilities that create, promote and sell his art. His detractors have ridiculed him as a sellout and as a player in the growing expectations of Japanese artists for readily consumed and exotic work. But this is praise for Murakami, and exactly what he wants. His art is inspired by the Japanese Otaku subculture, which is full of weird perversions of sweetness and innocence, as well as unbelievable brutality. Through this, Murakami makes a subtle criticism of the current culture of Japan and the impact of the West on it.

A large group of fancy gears obsessed by the world of fantasy are the sculpture of anime-inspired characters with voluptuous breasts that shoot streams of milk as if they were a jet-stray, overly cheerful drawings with raspberry, and sickeningly sweet painting with smiling daisies (all things “cute”). In his childhood, Murakami immersed himself in this environment, and as an artist, he started drawing stylistic inspiration and presenting viewers with a cynical and remote attitude.

Murakami developed his own trend dubbed Superflat, out of rejection of the world of art dominated by the West. The term alludes both to flattened works that lacked a single point of view from ancient Japanese aesthetic movements such as Nihonga and to flattening (or combining) art and trade. Superflat is the way Murakami brings Japanese history and current pop culture together. His colourful and simple aesthetic eye candy quickly attracted a large following to Murakami’s work. Critics have, however, criticised Superflat as a flagrant caricature and misrepresentation of contemporary Japan. Superflat has nonetheless influenced a whole generation of Japanese modern art.

Murakami created, making use of Andy Warhol’s factory, a new kind of pop art, appropriately called Neo-Pop, which did not only blur the boundary between pop culture and fine art, but totally eroded. Neo-Pop parodies of Murakami after the Japanese consumer culture by “sampling” and “remixing” its themes and characters into high art. Murakami factories create exquisite art which, combined with inexpensive toys that sell for only a few dollars, sells millions of dollars. In this regard, Murakami shatters the illusion of exclusivity and superiority in the art world, while profiting monetarily at the same time. His partnership with Louis Vuitton further broke the connection between art and business, while the wide availability of his drinks let everyone possess a Murakami work.

The work of Murakami must be regarded as profoundly critical to Western involvement. He was reared by parents in Japan where severe sanctions and persistent US military presence were subjected to catastrophic nuclear bombs. His Japanese works vary greatly from his English articles and reveal a profound cynism against the West and the global art industry in them. The current preoccupation with cuteness, young innocence, fetish and violence in Japan, Murakami views as a result of the United States involvement that started with the bomb. Many think that Murakami views his inspiration of this culture to the U.S. as high art as a sort of vengeance.

Childhood

Born in 1962, Takashi Murakami. Murakami’s dad was a driver of a cab, and his mother was a maker of a house. His mother, who studied needle points and made textiles, influenced Murakami’s interest in the arts enormously. He was frequently asked by his parents to write evaluations of exhibits he saw. He was forced to go to bed without supper if he refused. Murakami, raised in a fiercely competitive atmosphere, learnt to think and write fast. These abilities influence his subsequent reputation as a caustic art critic in part.

Murakami grew up hearing his mother say he wouldn’t have been born if the U.S. had launched another nuclear weapon. In the decades after WWII, the omnipresence of the destruction and the subsequent U.S. presence in Japan had a huge impact on Murakami’s creative development. Japan established a national identity during Murakami’s infancy which restored traditional Japanese culture and placed enormous pressure on its workers to produce in order both economically and culturally to compete with the West. This mixed focus on traditional Japanese culture and western influences has been mirrored in Murakami’s early activities, ranging from participating in Buddhist ceremonies to taking classes in Japanese calligraphy to seeing exhibits of artists like Renoir and Goya.

At an early age, Murakami acquired an interest in subcultures including otaku, anime and manga. This is an example of a fetich animation of anime.

Although he early became aware of both traditional Japanese culture and contemporary art in Europe, throughout his formative adolescent year’s Japanese animation had the most influence on him. This explains why most of his works go to the otaku public, an apocalyptic and fetishistic subculture. These recurrent themes in anime and manga correlate with the incapacity or maybe unwillingness of the otaku followers to engage in the real world or practise social skills. Murakami connects Otaku subculture himself directly to Japanese society after the Second World War.

Early LIfe

In 1980 he became interested in studying Background Art for Animations and was enrolled in the Department of Nihonga (a traditional Japanese form of painting that draws on aspects from Westerner Art) at Tokyo’s renowned National University of Fine Arts and Music (completed in 1993). He also studied animation creation outside school, studying the old methods at university, and maintained his understanding of the modern art world via visitor exhibits and the visiting artist programme of his school.

An exciting but annoying encounter with Joseph Beuys was a watershed in the creative career of Murakami in 1984. During a class discussion, Beuys disregarded a number of questions from the pupils and said “Questions are meaningless. I want a more significant question.” Beuys dismissed Murakami, while the renowned artist was irritated with what he regarded as ignorant students of Japanese art. As a consequence, Murakami started to express his profoundly critical attitude to the western art market during his seventh year at school.

The early works of Murakami reflect the reality he had grown up with, examining the complicated connection between Japan and the U.S. after WWII. For instance, Polyrhythmus (1991) employs toy troops from plastic World War II, Sea Breeze (1992) alludes to the atomic explosion. These paintings show his early development of a fun and apparently luminous style that constantly refers to a more sardonic approach.

Mid Life

In 1994, Murakami went to New York City to join the International Studio Program of the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. Murakami was alone and quite unhappy in New York and besieged by the demands of the American art industry and gallery system. In order to thrive in this environment, he recognised that he had to shed his excessively academic Japanese concern and portray himself and his work as a typical Japanese to a more simple brand. This period is therefore a dramatic breakthrough for his career. His work previously centred on a worldwide commitment to contemporary art, but it was during this time that he chose to re-engage with his Japanese identity and improve his work in terms of both nihonga’s high-art form, and popular anime and manga culture. On the eve of his trip from New York, Murakami, playing a late-night word game a buddy, who uses unsense terms such as “dobozite” (a manga word that means “why?”), came up with Mr DOB, who would become a signature character of the artist throughout his variety of artistic mediums. For the first time at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in 1995, Mr DOB inflatables were exhibited in New York but did not garner major critical notice. In 1996, he was part of a group show at the Feature Gallery. This exhibition marked the start of his worldwide recognition. During the second part of the nineties, Murakami designed a series of sculptures inspired by the Otaku subculture, including Miss ko2 (1996-97), Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998). Murakami’s free borrowings from Japanese popular culture were quite similar to the humorous appropriations of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

In 1996, Murakami established the Hiropon Factory to manufacture its otaku-inspired sculptures. Like many of Murakami’s works, his factory was based on both Japanese art workshops as well as Andy Warhol’s Factory, for example, which created vivid woodblocks from the Edo era. At Hiropon assistants who have received training in many areas of competence work with the artist for large-scale, mass-market projects. In 2001, the factory of Hiropon developed into Kaikai Kiki Co., a well-structured company with about 50 employees in its Tokyo office and 20 in its New York office and studio. The company, in addition to the production and promotion of Murakami’s works, supports new artists; runs art exhibitions, co-operates with fashion, music and entertainment people and businesses, and produces animated videos and films. Kaikai Kiki represents a shift in the production of the contemporary artwork, where fine art and business are integrated seamlessly and where the physical hand of an artist in the making of the artwork no longer determines its economic value, but rather creates its symbolic value by associating the artist with the commodities produced in his factory. Now in Tokyo, the company employs up to 60 full-time workers and in New York more than 20.

Murakami was a pioneer of the “Superflat” movement, which includes other artists, such as Yoshitomo Nara. The word super flat alludes not just to the flat look of the pictures, but also to the smoothing out of the difference between high art and popular culture.

Murakami introduced the idea of Superflat at a group show of the same title in 2000, looking for a post-war Japanese identity and out of frustration with his countrymen’ indifference to modern Japanese art. His own, Yoshitomo Nara, Shigeyoshi Ohi, Aya Takano and others worked on the show. The Superflat theory quickly crossed the current world of art, becoming a landmark trend in Japanese contemporary art, the latest significant style to achieve worldwide recognition in the world of art since the 1950s.

“A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art” (2000) is Murakami’s historical essay, the last example of his early disregard for the art world. There he articulates a desire to create a new kind of Japanese art that is intimately connected to the lengthy shadow cast by Japan’s anguish after the humiliating WWII loss. This article aims at extracting the very marrow of Japanese post-war culture and uses it as its fundamental ideology. As Pico Iyer says, Murakami “Is a genuine flight chronicler from the real. And just as Andy Warhol chose to provide the excess of mass manufacturing and mass fame to contemporary America with fury, so Murakami gave Japan the pictures she likes with her affection for the kawaii and the deviant forms that the otaku adores.” The Japanese version of this article showed a fiery anti-Americanism, whereas the stylistic development of his work is more focused on his English translation. In both versions, Murakami emphasises, however, the idea that “Superflatness is an original concept of the Japanese, which has been completely Westernized.”

His epic Superflat thesis seeks to connect Genji and Heiji with current Japanese pop culture in the history of Japanese art from the 12th and 13th centuries. Despite his art-historical and cultural references in art, essays, manifestos and interviews, his work frequently draws people instantly because of its seeming superficiality and a brilliant burst of characters and colours. This contradiction between the deep significance and the instant pleasure his audience enjoys clearly reflects the fluidity of his Superflat idea.

Current Works

Murakami projects have been increasingly commercially charged and explore unusual creative mediums like fashion, music, entertainment, public facility, animation and cinema since the establishment of the Hiropon Factory. This change between positions shows the desire of Murakami to redefine what a postmodern international artist may be.

In 2002, Murakami started his long-term partnership with the premium fashion company Louis Vuitton, at the request of designer Marc Jacobs. Murakami was able to modify the brand to fit his distinct style without losing his individuality in the LV project. For instance, he merged his own trademark jellyfish eyes with the monogram of LV or overprinted his cartoon cherries. That cooperation made Murakami renowned for further crossing commercial borders, enhanced Murakami’s celebrity profile in his homeland, and increased the economic worth of his work to one of (mainly Western) collectors.

His popularity in the world of fashion also spread into the pop music business. In 2007 Murakami designed Kanye West’s album Graduation as a Dropout Bear mascot and produced a cartoon video of West’s “Good Morning.” South Korean famous singers G-Dragon and Pharrell Williams, who worked with Murakami in 2009 and 2014, are collectors in the pop music industry. Murakami then “re-appropriated” these initiatives by integrating the same motif into his paintings and sculptures intended for renowned art institutions or important collectors.

The following generation of Japanese painters was inspired and directly taught by Murakami. He called himself the guru of the Kuriieita generation, the young adults of the two “lost decades” of Japan in the 1990s and 2000s, who grew up amid a declining society. He claimed that he was on a mission in Japan to deceive the West and destroy the Japanese system of art. He is also an active mentor for young Japanese artists via the use of their work in his factories, the curation of exhibits and writings that situate their work in the history of contemporary Japanese art. Chiho Aoshima, Chinatsu Ban, Akane Koide, Mahomi Kunikata, Mr., Rei Sato and Aya Takano are part of the Kaikai Kiki Co., whose significant presence in the field of Japanese art characterises Japanese art’s landscapes of the 21st century. Despite the conflict of reception between his works, which alternate between severe contempt and flagrant acclaim, Superflat came to dominate Japanese contemporary art from a global perspective.

Famous Art by Takashi Murakami

727

1996

Murakami’s avatar called Mr DOB is at the heart of this modern triptych. His open mouth exposes razor-sharp fangs as his many eyes wander around his vicinity manually. Japanese anime is renowned for exceptionally big-eyed cartoon characters, which often include a significant part of their faces. The wandering eyes in this painting go further with the exaggeration of anime.

Mr DOB, founded in 1993 by Murakami, is derived from “dobozite” as a Japanese slang, which is almost as follows: “why?” Mr DOB’s manic grin may be interpreted as Murkami’s laughing attitude both against the art world and toward the West. The term itself, 727, refers to the Boeing American aircraft that flew over his house from boyhood to military facilities in the United States. In that way, the title refers directly to the U.S. presence in Japan after the Second World War that Murakami is so eager to examine and criticise both in his work.

Super Nova

1999

Made in the Superflat-style trademark of Murakami, combining traditional Japanese painting with modern pop culture, it appears to be a joyous childhood dream, named Supernova, at first sight. However, the mutated eyes of these animals, fang-like spikes, kaleidoscopic hues, and deformed shapes, suggest that they are malevolent. The title of the piece alludes to a song named ‘Champagne Supernova’ by the British band Oasis from 1995. The connection with the song – with references to medicinal culture – indicates that these fantastic visuals could potentially be regarded as hallucinogenic (magic) champignons.

The 500 Arhats

2012

Grotesquely painted ancient men, chains of smaller human figures and portrays of Chinese guardians of the four celestial directions – blue (east), white (west) tiger, red (south) bird (north) – have the spectator overwhelmed in a work that is more than 320 feet long and 10 feet high.

These elderly guys are arhats, who translates approximately as “one who is worthy,” and allude to the monks who have attained illumination in Buddhism. However, these arhats are cunning and even malevolent as they overlook the spectator with suspicious eyes. At the foot of the picture, the lesser figures are the ones to be reached by the arhats – Buddhists. Murakami is just as harsh in his portrait, presenting a troublesome reversal of beauty and tranquilly, which is usually linked to the precious condition of mental enlightenment. Its skeleton forms, sharp bodies and red-rimmed eyes show the profound cynism of Murakami.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• Known for its brilliantly coloured and maniacally happy works, the meteoric emergence of Takashi Murakamí into the world of modern art was equally celebrated and criticised.
• Murakami combines Japanese mass culture with the rich creative heritage of the nation and eliminates any difference between commodities and high art.
• In comparison with Andy Warhol, he has both his art-as-business strategy and his huge manufacturing facilities that create, promote and sell his art.
• His art is inspired by the Japanese Otaku subculture, which is full of weird perversions of sweetness and innocence, as well as unbelievable brutality.
• Superflat has nonetheless influenced a whole generation of Japanese modern art.
• Murakami created, taking use of Andy Warhol’s factory, a new kind of pop art, appropriately called Neo-Pop, which did not only blur the boundary between pop culture and fine art, but totally eroded.
• Neo-Pop parodies of Murakami after the Japanese consumer culture by “sampling” and “remixing” its themes and characters into high art.
• Murakami factories create exquisite art which, combined with inexpensive toys that sell for only a few dollars, sells millions of dollars.
• In this regard, Murakami shatters the illusion of exclusivity and superiority in the art world, while profiting monetarily at the same time.
• His partnership with Louis Vuitton further broke the connection between art and business, while the wide availability of his drinks let everyone to possess a Murakami work.The work of Murakami must be regarded as profoundly critical to Western involvement.
• He was reared by parents in a Japan where severe sanctions and persistent US military presence were subjected to the catastrophic nuclear bombs.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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