Takashi Murakami pioneering happy art with massive social appeal
Approachable innovative icons by Takashi Murakami
Animation of Murakami’s characters, Kaikai and Kiki, Takashi Murakami
Takashi Murakami Japanese Artist
Whether your creative interests lie in high art or commercial media, Takashi Murakami is an artist whose work, if not name, is near impossible to avoid.
He initially intended to focus on the high art of Nihonga, a traditional style of Japanese painting for which he received a PhD, but was dissatisfied with the community’s cliquish, highly political nature.
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Wanting to explore more contemporary styles and feeling constrained by the limitations of Japanese art at the time, Murakami chose to establish himself in the Western art world, taking the skills learned to later develop the Japanese market.
Superflat theory
Murakami wanted to create art grounded in his culture and history that would still be approachable to an international audience.
With this desire, he developed his Superflat theory. Published in 2000, part of the theory argues that socio-economic differences and pop taste in Japan have flattened as an effect of postwar sentiment.
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Curated by Tobias Berger, with the help of staff from Tai Kwun Contemporary, Perrotin and Murakami’s production studio Kaikai Kiki, the Murakami vs Murakami exhibition showcases the stunning range of this Japanese contemporary artist’s abilities.
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From sculptures to wallpaper, animated film to eccentric costumes, Murakami challenges the audience’s perception of the aesthetic of happiness.
Murakami vs Murakami
All his works hold deeper, complex questions about what it means to exist as a creative individual in a world where positive emotions are marketed and sold en masse.
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Taking place at Tai Kwun Contemporary within the gentrified Former Central Police Station Compound, Murakami’s extensive display encompasses all three floors of the Centre for Heritage and Arts, as well as the entryway into the Prison Yard.
Blend of art and culture
Beginning on the third floor, visitors are first exposed to the subject of Murakami’s earliest commercial art success, the character Mr. DOB, whose construction captures Murakami’s creative blending of fine art and popular culture.
Excuse Painting – The Secret of DOB’s Birth, 2019, Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood panel, Takashi Murakami
Its unique name is derived from the Japanese slang, Dobozite. Translating to why?, the phrase was taken from the famous 1970s Japanese humour manga, Inakappe Taishō by Noboru Kawasaki.
Mr. DOB
The character, a mock-up figure, was designed as an artistic crossbreed intended to harmonise the finesse of high concept art with the universality that commercial art provided.
Mr. DOB captures the survival secret of recognisable characters such as Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty, who are able to effortlessly cross cultural boundaries and receive aesthetic appreciation.
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At the time of Mr. DOB’s inception, the Japanese art scene was imitating the textual artwork of American contemporaries, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer.
Beyond producing an art piece that would reflect both the past and present of Japanese art, the first section of the exhibit expresses Murakami’s concerns relating to mortality and mass deaths that have occurred in modern history.
Visceral memento mori
The carpeted floor is a pattern of overlapping skulls coloured in bold reds and yellows. The floor of skulls forces visitors to traverse a scene of devastation – as a visceral memento mori, a reminder of the vanity of earthly goods and pursuits.
The larger-than-life-sized portraits are displayed on dark walls of grey and speckled black. The artworks reflect both Murakami’s anxiety about nuclear power and the growing influence of Westernisation in Japanese culture.
Blue Life Force, 2012, Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, Takashi Murakami
Borne of his anxiety over the suffering that Japan faced in the aftermath of World War II, the winsome aesthetics conceal shock and anguish, forcing visitors to reconcile the innocent surface with the deeper meaning behind them.
Here, the figures of Tan Tan Bo make their first appearance in the exhibition. Based on a manga character by Mizuki Shigeru, the characters are phantoms that dance across the canvas.
Tan Tan Bo Black Hole, 2018, Acrylic and platinum leaf and gold leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, Takashi Murakami
They engage with colour in a peculiar fashion, vomiting out psychedelic patterns reminiscent of the Flower Power aesthetic.
In the centre of the room, a project that was ten years in the making makes its debut. The Birth Cry of a Universe first stuns viewers with its immense size and its gold leaf exterior.
Takashi Murakami characters
Upon further inspection, the many characters that comprise the piece are each suffering under their combined weight, the gold a distraction to their suffering.
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Past the jarring coupling of cute aesthetics with complex discourse about mortality and the state of the future, visitors are encouraged to share a look into Murakami’s private art collection.
Kawaii! Vacances d’été- Summer Landscape of Nostalgia, 2017, Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas on aluminum frame, Takashi Murakami
Not allowing photography, the artist intends for viewers not to contain the art for future consumption but to enjoy it as a static moment in time.
The displayed selection is a tiny fraction of his total collection, numbering in the thousands. Murakami’s collection reflects his historical and broad artistic interests, ranging from Japan to the West.
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In an explanatory canvas, Murakami has printed his views on art collection onto a watercolour pattern.
A self-proclaimed obsession, the artist believes that “The act of obtaining an artwork lets one get drunk on the extremely realistic illusion that one can freely journey across time and space, which in turn lets one completely forget about death.”
Installation by Takashi Murakami
Heading down towards the second stage of the exhibition, viewers step away from heavy messages about the frailty of the human condition to engage with the playful side of Murakami’s spirit.
An avid participant in cosplay, a portmanteau of the words costume play, it is a style of performative art that Murakami is well-versed in. A self-described otaku — someone obsessed with particular aspects of popular culture to the detriment of their social skills — cosplay allows Murakami to communicate with others and achieve attention in a way that overshadows his weakness in speaking English.
Geisai bi-annual art fair
He first pursued cosplay as a means of communicating with the national and global art world in 2002.
Developing Geisai, a bi-annual art fair that was hosted in two major cities, Murakami created the show as a platform to provide artists the freedom of designing their own booths, as opposed to showcasing pre-approved galleries. The art fair ran until 2014.
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Murakami has since become involved with ComplxCon LA, a creative collaboration that brings together the most influential people and the trendiest brands from sectors such as art, music, sports, education, and much more.
Costume for ComplxCon 2018, Takashi Murakami
Murakami’s colourful costumes, once solely utilized in the creative and collaborative atmospheres provided by such festivals, are now shown for the first time in an exhibition setting.
The cheery expression and wild poses of the mannequins, done in Murakami’s likeness, echo the youthful drive of the fifty-seven- year- old artist that draws people of all ages to admire his multifaceted works.
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From a wildflower costume that transforms the Murakami mannequin into a walking rendition of his own “Superflat” flowers to an octopus-inspired suit and elaborate traditional yukata.
A Superflat flower covered yukata and matching octopus hat, Takashi Murakami
Past the imaginative creations that are Murakami’s cosplay outfits, visitors reach the last floor of the exhibit. Stepping off a winding staircase, the glimmering gold of F Hall shines from viewers’ periphery.
Gold encompasses the entire room. Humanity’s long history of reverence tied with the colour gold provides the room with a quiet grace. The hall is sparsely filled, allowing each piece to become fully immersive.
Amitābha from the Enso Collection, Takashi Murakami
This section of the exhibit is titled Enso, meaning circle. In Zen Buddhism, the sacred circle symbolises the unity of everything and nothing.
Murakami’s Enso paintings explore the emptiness of existence and the finite nature of the human condition. Gold is spray-painted over embossed skull patterns and finished with a pristine white Enso.
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While offering a meditative space to contemplate individual life, this golden hall reflects on the interconnectedness of all life.
Each piece primarily features gold in its colour palette. Despite the differing characters and styles of the portraits and statues that make up the space, there is a unity to it all.
Flower Parent and Child, 2018, Gold leaf on carbon fibre, Takashi Murakami
Beside the Enso display is a celebration of the Superflat flowers. Here, the full spectrum of colour is used in the artwork that consumes the space.
The hall is surrounded by cheery-faced flora. Even the carpeted floor, titled the Flower Colour Chart Carpet, acts as a diagram of colour ranges.
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Beyond acting as a physical embodiment of his Superflat theory, the continuous presence of the flowers falls in line with Abstract Expressionism’s explorations of all-over compositions, with no linear structure to understand the displays.
Also shown are the characters Kaikai and Kiki, playing in an endless loop for curious children and adults to watch on a flat screen television.
The Birth Cry of a Universe, 2014, Gold leaf on aluminum, Takashi Murakami
Notable among these works is a work that combines childhood icon Doraemon with Murakami’s quirky flowers.
Murakami notes how Doraemon came to be at the time of the Apollo Moon Landing, falling into the boom of sci-fi interest in Japanese culture and acting as a means of exploring the optimistic possibilities that the future had in store.
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He suggests that manga art formed and thrived as a means for Japan to heal after the defeats suffered from WWII. After the room of innumerable flowers, visitors head off into the Tan Tan Bo Studies. Contrary to that, Murakami takes is not wildly passionate and improvised.
Careful methodology leads to the birth of his creations, works that have more than one set of hands involved to breathe life into them.
Doraemon in my Memory, 2019, Acrylic, gold leaf, and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, Takashi Murakami
Like Andy Warhol, to whom he is often compared, Murakami is the conceptualist of his creations. The creation of the paintings and sculptures, as well as design, administrative work, accounting and other work is a collective effort of approximately one hundred staff members of Kaikai Kiki, an art production and management company founded by Murakami.
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His creative efforts are on display, the exact nature of his preliminary sketches showing viewers the amount of effort that led to the development of these works.
Costume for the press conference of The Octopus Eats its Own Leg Exhibition at MCA Chicago 2017, Takashi Murakami
After the detailed look into Murakami’s process, a small room shows his Homage to Francis Bacon series. The unbalanced nature of Bacon’s work, touching the darker side of thinking, has led to Murakami’s long-held fascination with the British figurative painter.
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Following Bacon’s surreal iconography, in this series Murakami reshapes the body and forces the audience to approach the human figure from a new angle, with faces pulling out of faces and sharp tongues jutting out from fanged teeth.
Bacon: Three Studies of Lucian Freud, Red and Black, 2017
Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, Takashi Murakami
The Bacon series was a fifteen-year process of developing an intimate knowledge of Bacon and his process. While his period of working to understand Bacon has passed, Murakami believes that in studying and engrossing himself in Bacon’s method, his artistic abilities underwent a surreal transformation that is now a bedrock of his creative process.
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The themes of this shocking series are a clear demonstration of the complex messages entwined in the other works of this exhibition.
Leaving the exhibition, two silver sculptures stand in the prison yard as a lasting visual mark of the Murakami exhibition.
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Here displayed are the characters Kaikai, adorned with rabbit ears, and Kiki, who sports three eyes and fangs for teeth.
Kaikai and Kiki, Takashi Murakami
Their names, translated as supernatural or weird, are literally earmarked on the characters. Together, their names are the title of Murakami’s art company.
The pair are the brand’s mascots, reflecting the consumerist economy that Murakami has always explored.
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Adorable and not immediately seen to show meaning deeper than visual pleasantry, Kaikai and Kiki’s presence effectively sums up the audience’s journey through the Murakami vs Murakami exhibit, an at-once visually captivating experience filled with charming characters whose deeper meanings reveal the concerns that Murakami has for the future of art society and the state of humanity itself.
Text and photos Victoria Mae Martyn
