Takashi Murakami

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
White Cube, London
Private Collection, London

The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate. This work is in very good condition.
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Takashi Murakami's superbly unreal work Koumokkun presents an electric combination of Japanese tradition and modernity that meets the viewer at eye-level to assert a commanding yet fantastic presence. This exquisitely executed sculpture epitomises Murakami's desire to create a symbiotic relationship between commercial art and fine art and conflates a multitude of influences, from video game subculture in Japan to the implication of art-world Pop archetypes. Like the American Pop Art icon Andy Warhol, Murakami fuses high art and low culture by incorporating imagery from consumer culture to produce visually arresting and highly original work. The charismatic artist also lives and works in what he refers to as a factory and the exceptional degree of finish in his works, as exemplified by Koumokkun, is the product of extremely rigorous working practices. Murakami began his artistic career at Tokyo National University, where he pursued a doctorate in Nihonga, the branch of Japanese art that originated in the Nineteenth Century concerned with the naturalistic subjects of Still-Lifes and Landscapes. However, having witnessed the explosion of anime and manga visual culture in Japan during the 1980s, Murakami became disillusioned with Nihonga, finding it irrelevant to daily Japanese life. He sought instead to create an artistic dialect that was essentially current and related to the fast-changing pace of contemporary existence. Joyful and playful yet simultaneously incongruous and unknowable, the totemic figure of Koumokkun is a brilliant exposition of Murakami's development of this vernacular and is exactly typical of his inimitable style.