Takashi Murakami

signed in English and numbered 2/3  (with other 2 artist proofs) , executed in 2004

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Private Collection, USA

United Kingdom, Liverpool, Jellyfish Eyes Characters - Liverpool Biennial International 04, September - November, 2004 (alternate edition exhibited)
France, Versailles, Murakami Versailles, September - December, 2010 (alternate edition exhibited)

Bonami, Francesco and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, The Patagruel Syndrome, Turin: Skira Editore, 2005, unpaginated

This work is generally in good condition. Upon close inspection, there are pinpoint paint losses on the base and a minor scratch on the yellow button. A leaf on one of the flowers is detached and will be repaired by the artist studio after the sale.
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Between Fame and Fantasy:
Takashi Murakami

“The art I believed in was an art that makes your mind go blank, that leaves you gaping, that makes you ask questions because there’s nothing you know you can compare it to; something that must surprise and disorient you.”

Having single-handedly carved out a unique niche within the international contemporary art world, Takashi Murakami has undoubtedly become one of the most pivotal artists of our generation. Earning a doctorate from Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 1989, where he received his training in Nihonga (Traditional Japanese style) painting, the artist is a master of traditional Japanese compositional and material techniques, often borrowing from traditional concepts such as what Murakami has termed Hokusai’s “zooming in” method, as well as what he believes is the “aggressiveness” of the Japanese Momoyama period. In spite of this link to more traditional methods, however, his entire practice can also be conceived of as an extremely modern form of Gesamtkunstwerk through the multi-faceted operations of his company, Kaikai Kiki.

Murakami is most recognised in the world of contemporary art for producing finely crafted sculptures and paintings, but he is also an entrepreneur who has developed his own method of branding by operating in both the worlds of fine art and commercial culture. His company Kaikai Kiki is based on the terms “supernatural and bizarre”, which are used to describe the work of eccentric Edo period painters, such as that of Eitoku Kanô. Murakami has in turn used this term to create his signature characters Kaikai Kiki of the same name, both of whom recur throughout his oeuvre. Kaikai and Kiki are based around another of the artist’s characters named Oval, a figure inspired by the nursery rhyme’s Humpty Dumpty. As well as this, the creation of Oval was based on a request from the fashion designer Issey Miyake, who Murakami believes is capable of deftly combining his Japanese heritage with a universal accessibility. Similarly, Murakami wanted to inject this same sense of universality into his own character. Oval, who was also centred around the Hyakume cartoon figure—a monster with a thousand eyes—from Murakami’s childhood days, as well as the image of the Buddha, was accompanied by two acolytes of sorts: Kaikai and Kiki. “With these three characters—Oval, Kaikai and Kiki,” Murakami stated, “I wanted, I think, to create my own ‘gods of art’.”¹

The company operates as both a fine art studio with departments in painting, sculpture, design, animation, PR, marketing, merchandise, as well as the organiser of a biannual art fair for emerging artists in Asia. It manages several careers of young Japanese artists who exhibit their work at Kaikai Kiki gallery alongside young international artists, such as Mr. and Aya Takano.

A prolific writer, Murakami has also published several books directed as critical guides for survival in the art world, aimed for emerging artists in Japan. He is also a regular contributor to newspaper columns and serves as a radio host. However, he is perhaps most well-known outside of the art world for establishing himself within the realm of commercial collaborations including highly successful merchandise lines for Louis Vuitton, the grand opening of the Mori Art Museum in 2003,  advertising commissions, and corporate branding projects. His work with the fashion house included a complete rebranding of the logo, adding pops of colour as well as a floral motif to the original label. He has also established an independent animation studio that has just released his first feature-length film, Jellyfish Eyes (2013), a fantastical science fiction movie that confronts the traumatic aftermath of the 2011 Tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster from the perspective of youth.

The importance of youth and childishness, if not childhood, is central to an understanding of Murakami’s work. For instance, the creation of his Jellyfish Eyes works—which are the same creatures that the film is based on—is heavily influenced by the aforementioned Hyakume character, as well as Murakami’s childhood tale of a little girl terrified of an ominous painting that seemed to watch her everywhere she went. Murakami’s works are thus often important meeting grounds of childlike play and serious undercurrents.

Murakami’s role as an adroit critic of contemporary art and culture can be seen developing in his early forays into conceptual art and performance in the late-80s and early-90s, works which comprised of mock-appropriations of legendary Japanese art movements such as Gutai and Hi Red Center. These dealt with critical commentary on the communicative failure of the Japanese avant-garde to reach international recognition. Murakami was also an avid observer of Euro-American artistic practices of that time period, and his early projects often incorporated seductive elements of humour, irony and spectacle, which questioned values such as the use of endangered species skins to create randoseru backpacks for elementary school children (Randoseru Project, 1993). Other works looked to the past, such as a large-scale mural of a skull rising from the ashes of an atomic mushroom cloud (Time Bokan, 1993). Murakami would later add his signature cosmos flowers, the plainest and most ubiquitous of flowers in Japan, inside the blank hollows of the skull’s eyes.

Murakami’s early works deftly penetrated the enclosed worlds of traditional Japanese fine art and contemporary art. The concept and aesthetics behind are essentially his main tools in creating new narratives that not only contribute to the rise of Neo-Pop aesthetics in the early-90s, but also reflect the pervasive struggle of cultural and identity politics in the world at the time. On a theoretical level, Murakami is certainly at the forefront of Japanese contemporary art, constructing a distinctive artistic practice that not only integrates high art and consumer culture, but also independently operates both within and outside the cusp of both worlds. While he has acknowledged predecessors such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jeff Koons as inspirations, the Japanese artist has truly surpassed their influences on all fronts through the integration of his artworks with the business model of his company Kaikai Kiki.

Looking into his interest in underground manga comics and anime, the artist further reinvented the otaku subculture through showcasing his highly stylised human-scaled figurines such as Miss Ko2 (1996) and SMPKO2 (2000) across different wonderland festivals for commercial trade figure makers in Japan. These figures would later be developed into highly sexualised sculptural models such as the Lonesome Cowboy and Hiropon (2000), making their first appearance in the realm of high art through the participation in different art fairs and galleries across the world. The creation of figurines such as Miss Ko2 as well as Lonesome Cowboy is indicative of Murakami’s style of combining “cuteness” with something more complicated. The artist comments on the sexualised Lonesome Cowboy, whose phallus in fact served as inspiration for his later mushroom works, after commentators brought to his attention their resemblance to one another. The image of the mushroom, poised between the artist’s self-crafted explicit symbol, as well as a universal symbol for childhood—especially in a Western context of fairy tale toadstools—is yet another example of the artist’s unique ability of compressing diametrically opposite concepts into one single object. Not unlike, for example, the artist’s method of Superflat.

In the millennium period, Murakami has experienced tremendous popularity with his Superflat aesthetics, which points not only to the flattening of high and low art, but also links the fundamental functions between art and everyday life. The concept of Superflat is in turn the artist’s rendition of a Nihonga-inspired optical illusion, where objects— some further and some closer to the viewer—are all compressed into one dimension, foregoing the need for depth or scale as the viewing of the image becomes one. In his Superflat Museum, small collectible items of his large-scale figurines are distributed through convenient stores, adopting a business model that opens the access of these figures and products to the everyday consumer. During the same period, several characters and motifs are also aesthetically transformed, including Murakami’s alter ego Mr. DOB, an erratic, monster-like figure, the winking Jellyfish eyes and the smiling Cosmos flowers. First appearing on small-scaled canvases in 1995, the flower motif along with the jellyfish eyes were expanded into a dizzying array of media including circular canvases, wallpapers, and ultimately into the plastic Flower Ball sculptures that symbolised the never aging status of the “supercute” ideal. One can see the jellyfish eyes blending within the candy-coloured canvas grids with Louis Vuitton’s LV and cloverleaf logos in the Eye Love SUPERFLAT (2004) and The World of Sphere paintings. Produced separately from the high-end brand accessories, these paintings are intentionally hovered between the aura of the Louis Vuitton logo and Murakami’s own signature motif, exemplifying a different aspect of Superflat that expands beyond the simple integration of fine art and mass culture. In essence, through the development of the Kaikai Kiki brand, Murakami has found methods to expose the possibility for a truly reciprocal process of collaboration in a manner that integrates highly different contexts, genres, and worlds. Combining his interests from the modern, contemporary world, while extending more traditional aspects of Japanese art, Murakami has undoubtedly marked his importance in the world of contemporary art.

 1 Takashi Murakami Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Serpentine Gallery, p.87



Inflating the Superflat
Takashi Murakami

“Until recently, the kawaii fashion was really flourishing, but these days it has been replaced by the ‘dark side’.”

Grinning daisy upon grinning daisy edge into crisp blue skies, as amorphous eyeballs scatter themselves indiscriminately on large canvases. Such is the mesmerising Superflat world of Takashi Murakami, the Japanese artist that has been repeatedly referred to as Japan’s very own Andy Warhol. Murakami’s universe is one populated by adorable creatures of various shapes and sizes, their kawaii factor having become synonymous with their loveable creator himself. Murakami’s sculpture, Jellyfish Eyes-Saki (Lot 53) is no different, literalising all the concepts that have become trademark to the artist in a spectacular three dimensional format. The piece evokes concepts such as the aforementioned Superflat, as well as the titular Jellyfish Eyes, along with the quintessentially Murakami daisies. Moreover, Saki, the little figurine in the midst of this endearing sculpture is also a key character in the artist’s cartoon series, as well as in the first Murakami film recently released called Jellyfish Eyes. The work on offer is not only exemplary in highlighting how diverse the Japanese artist’s oeuvre has become, but also reveals the artist as a protagonist in capturing contemporary Japanese society.

The Jellyfish Eyes-Saki sculptures are a series of works that Murakami first fashioned out of sketches, then later developed into life-size sculptures such as the present piece. The work depicts Saki, one of Murakami’s many cartoon figures, atop a lopsided orb of sorts that is splattered with pink blotches. Out of this strange shape sprouts stalks of smiling daisies. Despite its sweet façade however, there is a dark aspect to the background of Saki. Saki is one of the artist’s cartoon creations, part of an ongoing storyline that involves other children such as Tatsuya and Max, along with a dog called Shimon. Together they live in a world called Jellyfish Eyes, where yokai, traditional Japanese monsters, threaten the fate of the world. The yokai live in a world beyond the bounds of the earth, their eyes constantly spinning; a nod to a character from Murakami’s own childhood, the character Hyakume created by manga artist Shigeru Mizuki.

This dark side of a seemingly innocent piece of work is extremely typical of Murakami’s designs. The artist has once spoken about the “pain” inherent to his beaming floral works. In an interview with Hélène Kelmachter in 2002, Murakami recalls the decades he spent with flowers—studying floral motifs, painting flowers in exams, teaching floral drawing, as well as having to buy flowers every two days for his students to study—which bore in him a feeling verging on annoyance: “I find them just as pretty; just as disturbing.”¹ Eventually he saw them as symbolic of the human strength somehow, commenting, “At the same time there is this strength in them; it is the same image of strength I find when drawing the human face.”² This strength, or rather, perseverance, is something he alludes to when discussing the flowers in a recent interview with CNN interviewer Kristie Lu Stout. Behind the cheerful faces are painstaking hours of painting that are nearly invisible to a visitor’s eye, allowing the flower to become a form of disguise.

Considering how many people remark that Murakami’s works give off a “childish” charm, it is curious to remark that the role of girls, or more specifically, young girls, are in fact loaded symbols of the artist’s childhood memories. For example, Murakami often discusses the notion of Jellyfish Eyes alongside a tale he heard of when he was a boy, about a girl who was terrified of returning home for fear of being stared at by a portrait in her house, which she believed would follow her with its eyes no matter where she stood. Considering this, one suddenly realises that in fact Saki is standing atop something resembling a gargantuan eyeball; its danger entirely unbeknownst to her.

The interplay between such ideas along with innocent ones can be metaphorically understood through Murakami’s coinage of Superflat in 2000, a concept that was developed out of his original term, poku (a portmanteau of Pop and otaku; the latter at times a derogatory term referring to someone who lives virtually, devoting a lot of time to their computer screens). Wanting to distort the worlds of “high art” and “low art”, Superflat refers to the notion of literally flattening these two worlds, the former believed to be confined to the privileged, while the latter, including “low” otaku, is reserved only for the lowest classes. When one sees Jellyfish Eyes Saki, one is faced with the full amalgamation Murakami has achieved. One can identify the anime aspects of the work, as can clearly be seen by the cartoonish rendering of the entire sculpture; yet there are also undeniable streaks of the artist’s self-confessed love for more classical Japanese works. One such example is in the employment of the sporadic flowers atop of the eyeball, which reminds one immediately of floral designs from the Edo period artist, Kôrin Ogata. One finds in such works flowers emerging out of the earth just as Murakami’s present piece does.

Perhaps an even stronger appropriation of classical Japanese art styles is Murakami’s reproduction of the idea of “angles”. Murakami has discussed the famous classical artists Hokusai’s technique of “zooming in” to paint specific objects (what the artist has dubbed a “‘one point’ perspective”³), or combining many different “angles” in one painting. The first technique can be seen in erotic prints, for instance in Keisai Eisen’s Passion in the Snows of Spring, while the second can be found in works such as Katsushika Hokusai’s Tama River in The Musashi Province. Much in the same way, Jellyfish Eyes-Saki employs many different angles. Murakami exaggerates Saki’s round belly, while minimising her legs in order to create a doll-like, youthful look. In a peculiar fashion, this is a literalisation of what he was trying to achieve in his Superflat works, namely to create depth in a two-dimensional piece. The present sculpture toys with this concept, creating an optical illusion of the girl, as if she is inflated despite being completely still. This idea of inflation is in line with Murakami’s dabbling into large-scale balloon replicas of his famous figures.

Being hailed as an artist, sculptor, curator and fashion icon, Murakami has recently ventured into the world of film. Curiously, this year saw the premiere of his first ever film, Jellyfish Eyes or Mememe no Kurage in Japanese. It shares the tale of Masashi, a boy living in the perils of a post-Fukushima world, who relocates with his family to a new and mysterious town where children use remote controlled pets called “Friends” to battle. Masashi grows close to his own Friend, called Kurage-bo, who has “eyes like a jellyfish”. The Friends are part of a wider alien plot that wants to alter their negative energy into a super monster, reminiscent of Japanese kaiju films such as Godzilla. Together with Saki, Masashi must combat evil in this strange new world.

This unique outlook into the world beyond art—extending to include cultural and even environmental concerns—truly encapsulates the uniqueness to Murakami’s work. Despite its charming outlook, his works are always filled with a restrained glimmer of nostalgia, one that can only be understood after in depth familiarisations of the artist’s background. It is also pregnant with classically Japanese symbols, which allows Murakami to align himself against the rich history of Japanese art. More importantly, however, it is Murakami’s exceptional eye for detail that has allowed his work to surpass the level of mere sculpture, print or painting, but to arrive at the level of valid and valuable social commentary.

1 Takashi Murakami Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Serpentine Gallery, p.84
2 Refer to 1
3 Takashi Murakami Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Serpentine Gallery, p.83