村上隆

Marianne Boesky, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1999

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although the pink is brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a few minute fly spots in isolated places. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Executed in 1998, May Satsuki belongs to Takashi Murakami’s corpus of monumental Splash paintings; works that specifically allude to the artist’s now iconic and hyper-sexualised sculptures, Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998). Considered together, these pieces are entrenched in the erotic domain of anime and manga – an integral facet of Murakami’s heavily otaku inspired practice of the mid to late 1990s. From 2000 onwards, the prominence of erotic male fantasy – an integral part of otaku culture – would give way to a more feminine kawaii (cuteness). However, it is within these crucial 1990s pieces that Murakami created his most conceptually intriguing and provocative work. For Murakami, who considers himself part of otaku, a word that came to represent a sect of predominantly male, geeky fans of Japanese pop-culture that emerged during the 1960s, the proliferation of a world of cosplay, anime, manga and sexually suggestive figurines was the means by which Japan dealt with the aftermath of the Second World War. As outlined by Arthur Lubow in The New York Times: “Murakami maintains that respectable Japanese artists largely ignored the horrors of World War II and the humiliations of postwar occupation, relinquishing the subjects to otaku, who transported these tough realities into the realm of cartoon fantasy” (Arthur Lubrow, ‘The Murakami Method’, The New York Times Magazine, 3 April 2005, online resource). 

The present work requires some contextualisation in relation to Murakami’s notorious edition of male and female sculptures: My Lonesome Cowboy and Hiropon. Executed as a body of work between 1997 and 1998, these over life-size anime-inspired figures were first exhibited with two of the artist’s Splash paintings as their companion pieces. One pink and one blue, these candy-coloured paintings are streaked with manga-inspired thrashes of white fluid and were displayed behind their gender appropriate male and female sculptural counterparts. Murakami’s panoramic Splash paintings thus appear as the gestural remnants of each sculpture’s sexually explicit action. Hiropon, named after a recreational drug popular in postwar Japan, is inspired by the ubiquitous otaku fantasy embodied by collectible erotic pretty-girl figurines known as bishojo, while My Lonesome Cowboy represents her sexually heroic male equivalent based on the lead protagonist from the iconic computer game, Final Fantasy. Ostensibly child-like, sporting the wide eyes and smiles synonymous with the infantilising aesthetic of anime, these nude hairless bodies respectively brandish engorged lactating breasts and a pornographically erect and ejaculating penis. The milky discharge from both creates a display of flowing, snaking residue that encircles each figure, taking the form of a skipping rope for Hiropon and a lasso for My Lonesome Cowboy. The present painting can therefore be viewed as the screen onto which the imagined fall-out from these figures, either milk or semen, has been projected and bespattered.

Herein, the notion of the screen is intriguing for its doublespeak within Murakami’s practice. The four-part, panel-like construction of this colossal painting echoes the folding screens (or byōbu) of the Kano School, whilst the animated aesthetic of the barbed streaks of fluid alludes to the hyper-space of a video game within the virtual reality of a computer screen. As explained by Lubow: “One of Murakami’s favourite artworks is a screen depicting an old plum tree that was painted for a temple in Kyoto by Sansetsu Kano in the 17^th century and is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In his ‘Superflat’ essay, Murakami pointed to similarities between the spiky lines in Sansetsu’s eccentric masterpiece and the designs of the leading anime artist Yoshinori Kanada” (Ibid.). In May Satsuki cartoon whips and drips of white liquid against an immaculate pink expanse simultaneously evoke the calligraphic arabesques of the Kano school, whilst appearing as a saccharine manga pastiche of American Abstract Expressionism (particularly the canonical works of Jackson Pollock) and can be seen as a nod to the notorious Paysage fautif (1946) by Marcel Duchamp, which was painted with his own semen. This meeting of high and low culture represents the very core of Murakami’s work. The revered practices and processes of Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting) are assimilated to exquisitely render the artist’s cute smiling flowers, colourful mushrooms and invented pantheon of characters such as Mr. DOB, Mr. Pointy and the good and bad toddlers Kaikai and Kiki – subjects entirely inspired by popular Japanese culture. 

A large part of this broad and encompassing imperative is indebted to the traditional way in which Japanese society does not distinguish cultural hierarchies. Murakami himself is both artist and entrepreneur. At the same time as creating artworks that deal with intellectual and aesthetic questions, he has built an empire and mechanised an entire industry from his art. From the hub that is Kaikai Kiki (a literal factory where employees clock in and out every day), figurine collectibles based on the artist’s sculptures have been put into production, a collaboration with Louis Vuitton has taken place, Murakami has founded the semi-annual art competition, Gesai, and recruited an army of artist acolytes, including the likes of Mr. and others who have since found commercial success. Indeed, unlike Warhol who sourced from the low and gave to the high with ironic detachment, Murakami seeks to widen his audience and make his imagery accessible to everyone.