A guide to Takashi Murakami, founder of Superflat

The output of superstar Japanese artist Takashi Murakami ranges from paintings, sculpture and prints to fashion collaborations and merchandise. His multimedia oeuvre is dominated by characters and motifs drawn from his own imaginative universe and inspired by traditional and contemporary Japanese art and culture.

Murakami is a pioneer of the ‘superflat’ theory of art, and his Instagram account has more than 2.5 million followers.

Murakami’s art is inspired by anime and manga

Optical overload is a signature feature of Murakami’s work. Over the years, he has developed a distinctive aesthetic universe filled with candy colours, indiscriminate detail and eccentric recurring characters — such as Mr DOB and Miss ko2.

Inspired by art forms such as anime and manga, he has put his own psychedelic, Japanese spin on Pop art.

He studied 19th-century painting

Murakami was born and raised in Tokyo, where he still lives today (his studio is in Miyoshi, an hour outside the city). He attended Tokyo University of the Arts, gaining a PhD in nihonga, a late-19th-century style of Japanese painting.

In 1994, he visited New York to take part in the International Studio Program at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1). It proved a major turning point: it was at that moment of his career — on briefly leaving Japan — that his work became distinctly Japanese.

What is ‘superflat’, Murakami’s art theory?

Murakami gained a level of critical appreciation in 2000 when he first espoused his now-famous ‘superflat’ theory. This amounts to a manifesto of his whole practice.

According to the theory, Murakami’s work is a fitting continuation of Japanese imagery that goes as far back as the great ukiyo-e (‘fleeting world’) prints of the Edo period. This is for two main reasons. First, because — unlike Westerners — the Japanese have traditionally seen no distinction between fine and commercial art; and second, because linear perspective is not part of the Japanese tradition.

As such, the country’s art can be considered ‘flat’ in more ways than one — and, therefore, superflat.

The artist’s most enduring character is Mr DOB

It was at P.S. 1 that Murakami debuted an inflatable version of Mr DOB, his most enduring character. This fantastical grinning creature is a hybrid of many influences, including Sonic the Hedgehog, the manga character Doraemon and the yokai monsters of Japanese folklore.

Mr DOB has appeared in numerous incarnations over the years, in paintings, sculptures, even as a plush toy. Instantly recognisable, he has become a brand mascot for Murakami — and almost an alter ego.

Murakami’s embrace of kawaii

Murakami’s art has helped familiarise Western audiences with a number of Japanese concepts. One of these, kawaii — translatable as ‘cuteness’ — is famously exemplified by the Hello Kitty franchise. Murakami’s ready supply of smiley-faced flowers and perky mushrooms are in the kawaii spirit, too.

The same can very often be said of Mr DOB — though not always. The character sometimes takes on a darker, slightly menacing appearance, as in the canvas Tan Tan Bo, which fetched more than $5 million at Christie’s in New York in 2018.

Miss ko2 and otaku

Another concept at the core of Murakami’s practice is otaku, literally ‘your house’. This pertains to a geeky subculture of young, predominantly male, Japanese obsessives glued to their comics and computer screens. They prefer to stay at home rather than go out, and tend to regard women as objects of fantasy.

Miss ko2 should be seen in the context of otaku. Dating back to 1996, this doe-eyed waitress dressed in a miniskirt and stiletto heels, has appeared in myriad sculptures and paintings — as well as the movie Jellyfish Eyes.

When Christie’s offered one of Murakami’s earliest paintings of Miss ko2, the artist reflected on her creation through an Instagram post: ‘All I can remember feeling was pain and struggle. But at the same time, I was also working on a 3D figure version of this character, which would become a prototype for the anime-style sculptures that would bring me my breakthrough. In that sense, this painting contains the basis on which I subsequently built my career.’

It’s worth adding that the highest price for a Murakami work at auction — the fibreglass sculpture My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) — is of a man engaged in a favourite otaku pastime: masturbating. It fetched $15.2 million in 2008, the same year that Murakami was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Murakami’s global exhibitions

Murakami’s imagery is sometimes described as hallucinogenic. He insists, however, that ‘I don’t actually take drugs… I’ve no experience of them.’ He quips that, where ‘Western people need drugs to release dopamine [the hormone associated with pleasure], in Japan we just play video games’.

The artist has been the subject of many international retrospectives, including last year’s Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow at The Broad in Los Angeles, and Murakami vs Murakami at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, in 2019, alongside major shows at Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery).

In 2010, he became only the third contemporary artist to have a solo exhibition at the Palace of Versailles.

Collaborations with Supreme, Uniqlo and Louis Vuitton

His appeal, however, reaches far beyond the art world. He has teamed up with several fashion brands, such as Supreme, Uniqlo and Louis Vuitton, for whom he designed handbags for more than a decade.

Murakami even collaborated on a sculpture with the musician Pharrell Williams: The Simple Things features Mr DOB with seven dazzling objects visible inside his open mouth. These include a bag of Doritos and a can of Pepsi; all are made of gold and set with a total of 26,000 diamonds. The unique work sold for HK$21,725,000 at Christie’s in Hong Kong in 2019.

In 2011 Christie’s in New York held a special event, New Day: Artists for Japan, part of an initiative set up in memory of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The auction offered works by artists including KAWS, Aya Takano, Yoshimoto Nara and Jeff Koons. Murakami contributed four works, including New day: Face of the Artist.

Murakami’s response to the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami

In recent years, there have been subtle but significant changes in Murakami’s art. He has produced work on a larger scale and in an increasingly diverse range of media, and has become increasingly ambitious in collaborations with other artists.

The most notable change, however, is that in the past decade Murakami has admitted to letting a more spiritual element enter his work, thanks to an engagement with Japan’s religious (especially Buddhist) past. This happened following the 2011 disaster.

‘After that, my philosophy completely changed,’ he says. ‘I'm now respectful of how beliefs [have been] a way for people to deal with challenges from nature or elsewhere.’

One typical recent work is the 82-foot-long In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, part of The Broad’s collection.

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