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拍品專文
“Miss ko² is a disturbingly cheerful Frankenstein of global Pop, part Barbie, part anime, part American pin-up, entirely Murakami.” Roberta Smith
Standing six feet tall, Takashi Murakami’s Miss Ko2 (Project Ko2) is the artist’s first life-size sculpture, representing the radical reinvention of his artistic project and ushering in his famed fluid period. Miss Ko2 has taken up a totemic position in Murakami’s oeuvre, capturing the seismic moment in which his revolutionary Superflat movement catapulted into the third dimension. Here, we witness Murakami developing this theory, wherein he envisions the dissolution between distinctions vis-à-vis high art and low culture in Japan, made irrelevant in the postwar context as all creative forms were metaphorically flattened into exaggerated caricatures of sexuality and emotion corrupted by a predominant Western cultural influence. In Murakami’s Superflat world, “the maladjusted outsider of the otaku—obsessing over details of comics, games, anime, or other aspects of geek culture—became the true driver of contemporary culture, pushing unrequited desires and unresolved anguished into the hollow shell of cartoon characters” (M. Darling, “Superflat,” in Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eates Its Own Leg, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, p. 96). Murakami mimetically critiques the infusion of Western culture into Japanese society and the hypereroticized excesses of the otaku—or geek—subculture. Miss Ko2 magisterially weaves his deep understanding of Japanese society and its traditional artforms into an artwork aping consumerist society.
To create Miss Ko2, Murakami appropriated the character Yuka Takeuchi from the exuberant Japanese fighting video game Variable Geo. She wears an eroticized version of the popular waitress’ uniform of Anna Millers, an American pie restaurant chain then prevalent in Japan. Murakami’s collaborator Bome describes Variable Geo as “an utterly artless pandering to stereotypical otaku fetishism. Nor is it an original—rather it was created with a complete understanding of the tastes of the entire otaku market for uniform fetishism” (Bome, quoted in T. Murakami, “Life as a Creator,” in Takashi Murakami: Summon Monsters? Open the Door? Heal? Or Die?, exh.cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2001, p. 139). These aspects made it a perfect subject for appropriation, exemplifying Murakami’s conception of Superflat. By expanding this character into a life-size scale, the artist made legible the absurdity of the otaku subculture. As Murakami writes, “the very idea of making a life-size figure character was taboo within the otaku community. Figure culture began in response to a desire to somehow call the beloved characters of manga and anime forth into the real world, to have them at one’s fingertips. At the root of the figure character was their clear functionality as pornographic statues” (T. Murakami, ibid., p. 138). While paralleling the appropriative strategies of Western artists, including Richard Prince and Jeff Koons, Murakami is simultaneously channeling the traditional Japanese artistic tradition of Mitate, the repurposing of existing objects, where the artist creates something new by adding subtle touches of originality.
Miss Ko2 was able to depict how, within the milieu of the late 1990s, cultural categories of low and high were destabilized as the consumer economy absorbed high art. Using similar strategies of imitating mass culture found in Koons’s simulationisms and the appropriative approach of Prince, Murakami successfully parodies the West while confronting the inherent problems he saw with Japanese society. His Miss Ko2 figure wears a fetishized uniform of an overseas (American) company which had come to dominate Japanese cultural expression, while her life-size scale simultaneously critiques the fetishized obsession with figurines in the Japanese otaku fandom. The sculpture’s revealing bust, slender arms, and anatomically inconceivable proportions—slender arms, anime-doll face, and impossibly long, crossed legs—capture in realistic scale the absurdity of the feminine figurine ideal held by sections of Japanese society. The multilayered valiances held within the sculpture extend through to the work's very name. Ko can mean child, girl, young woman, or even a fish egg in Japanese, while it also frequently constitutes a part of a female given name. Thus, Miss Ko2, pronounced Miss Ko Ko, can be interpreted with layered simultaneous meanings.
Miss Ko2 was the first of Murakami’s life-size fiberglass figurines, providing the template for celebrated works such as Hiropon (1997), and My Lonesome Cowboy (1997), of which examples of both reside in the Pinault Collection. The foundational importance of Miss Ko2 for Murakami’s broader oeuvre is demonstrated in the work’s extensive exhibition history, appearing in the artist’s celebrated retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and most spectacularly at Murakami Versailles, where the sculpture was placed in the Salon de Guerre, right at the entrance to the palace’s famed Hall of Mirrors and below an extravagant marble portrait of King Louis XIV. Her position at the precipice of French imperial power, with her outstretched left hand positioned as if beckoning the viewer into the Hall of Mirrors to view the remainder of Murakami’s work, poignantly recapitulates Miss Ko2’s singular importance within the artist’s vaunted oeuvre, representing the inaugural inception of his universally influential Superflat movement.
Standing six feet tall, Takashi Murakami’s Miss Ko2 (Project Ko2) is the artist’s first life-size sculpture, representing the radical reinvention of his artistic project and ushering in his famed fluid period. Miss Ko2 has taken up a totemic position in Murakami’s oeuvre, capturing the seismic moment in which his revolutionary Superflat movement catapulted into the third dimension. Here, we witness Murakami developing this theory, wherein he envisions the dissolution between distinctions vis-à-vis high art and low culture in Japan, made irrelevant in the postwar context as all creative forms were metaphorically flattened into exaggerated caricatures of sexuality and emotion corrupted by a predominant Western cultural influence. In Murakami’s Superflat world, “the maladjusted outsider of the otaku—obsessing over details of comics, games, anime, or other aspects of geek culture—became the true driver of contemporary culture, pushing unrequited desires and unresolved anguished into the hollow shell of cartoon characters” (M. Darling, “Superflat,” in Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eates Its Own Leg, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, p. 96). Murakami mimetically critiques the infusion of Western culture into Japanese society and the hypereroticized excesses of the otaku—or geek—subculture. Miss Ko2 magisterially weaves his deep understanding of Japanese society and its traditional artforms into an artwork aping consumerist society.
To create Miss Ko2, Murakami appropriated the character Yuka Takeuchi from the exuberant Japanese fighting video game Variable Geo. She wears an eroticized version of the popular waitress’ uniform of Anna Millers, an American pie restaurant chain then prevalent in Japan. Murakami’s collaborator Bome describes Variable Geo as “an utterly artless pandering to stereotypical otaku fetishism. Nor is it an original—rather it was created with a complete understanding of the tastes of the entire otaku market for uniform fetishism” (Bome, quoted in T. Murakami, “Life as a Creator,” in Takashi Murakami: Summon Monsters? Open the Door? Heal? Or Die?, exh.cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2001, p. 139). These aspects made it a perfect subject for appropriation, exemplifying Murakami’s conception of Superflat. By expanding this character into a life-size scale, the artist made legible the absurdity of the otaku subculture. As Murakami writes, “the very idea of making a life-size figure character was taboo within the otaku community. Figure culture began in response to a desire to somehow call the beloved characters of manga and anime forth into the real world, to have them at one’s fingertips. At the root of the figure character was their clear functionality as pornographic statues” (T. Murakami, ibid., p. 138). While paralleling the appropriative strategies of Western artists, including Richard Prince and Jeff Koons, Murakami is simultaneously channeling the traditional Japanese artistic tradition of Mitate, the repurposing of existing objects, where the artist creates something new by adding subtle touches of originality.
Miss Ko2 was able to depict how, within the milieu of the late 1990s, cultural categories of low and high were destabilized as the consumer economy absorbed high art. Using similar strategies of imitating mass culture found in Koons’s simulationisms and the appropriative approach of Prince, Murakami successfully parodies the West while confronting the inherent problems he saw with Japanese society. His Miss Ko2 figure wears a fetishized uniform of an overseas (American) company which had come to dominate Japanese cultural expression, while her life-size scale simultaneously critiques the fetishized obsession with figurines in the Japanese otaku fandom. The sculpture’s revealing bust, slender arms, and anatomically inconceivable proportions—slender arms, anime-doll face, and impossibly long, crossed legs—capture in realistic scale the absurdity of the feminine figurine ideal held by sections of Japanese society. The multilayered valiances held within the sculpture extend through to the work's very name. Ko can mean child, girl, young woman, or even a fish egg in Japanese, while it also frequently constitutes a part of a female given name. Thus, Miss Ko2, pronounced Miss Ko Ko, can be interpreted with layered simultaneous meanings.
Miss Ko2 was the first of Murakami’s life-size fiberglass figurines, providing the template for celebrated works such as Hiropon (1997), and My Lonesome Cowboy (1997), of which examples of both reside in the Pinault Collection. The foundational importance of Miss Ko2 for Murakami’s broader oeuvre is demonstrated in the work’s extensive exhibition history, appearing in the artist’s celebrated retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and most spectacularly at Murakami Versailles, where the sculpture was placed in the Salon de Guerre, right at the entrance to the palace’s famed Hall of Mirrors and below an extravagant marble portrait of King Louis XIV. Her position at the precipice of French imperial power, with her outstretched left hand positioned as if beckoning the viewer into the Hall of Mirrors to view the remainder of Murakami’s work, poignantly recapitulates Miss Ko2’s singular importance within the artist’s vaunted oeuvre, representing the inaugural inception of his universally influential Superflat movement.