The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1962. Takashi Murakami studied the art of Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting) within the National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo. The unique and self-sufficient style of the author is expressed through many mediums, including painting, sculpture, industrial design or fashion. He is an artist of the pictorial language, one of those which were strongly influenced by both popular culture and the formal characteristics of traditional art, such as flatness, applying a boss and abundant ornamentation. In 1990, Murakami was introduced to contemporary art with the artist Masato Nakamura, his friend, and companion. In 1993, he created his avatar, Mr. DOB and became known in Japan and abroad for its original synthesis of traditional Japanese art, modern currents of his country as the anime and manga and the US culture, dominantly in the pop facet. Very often the critics designate him as the Japanese Andy Warhol. In his texts, Murakami theorizes artistic style "Superflat" (super-thin), which characterizes some of his works. Focusing on the two-dimensional, this style challenges the cultural hierarchy by blurring the lines of division between high culture and culture for ordinary people. Takashi Murakami founded in Tokyo in 1996, the Hiropon Factory, a sort of midway between traditional and modern workshops of Japanese corporations. Two years later, he opened a branch in Brooklyn. From that moment, Murakami multiplied his professions and engagements: he became a curator, participated in various individual projects and exhibitions in the United States. In 1999, he published a book "Hello, You Are Alive: Tokyo Pop Manifesto", his first manifesto on Japan's specific contribution to contemporary art.
In 2000, Murakami's Superflat Commissioner, the first exhibition of a trilogy of the same name presented at the Parco Gallery in Tokyo, and then, with great success at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The event seeks to demonstrate that the manga and anime are a significant part of the heritage of Japan. In 2001, the MOCA in Los Angeles again places its relief work by hosting "Public Offerings". Kakai Kiki Co.Ltd. He opens doors in Tokyo and New York by taking the legacy of his Hiropon Factory.
In early 2002, Le Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris, and the Serpentine Gallery in London welcomed Takashi Murakami’s "Kaikai Kiki." A year later, Murakami installed "Reversed Double Helix," his largest public sculpture at New York's Rockefeller Center, and began collaborating with Louis Vuitton. Three years later, in 2005, the artist completed his trilogy of exhibitions "Superflat" with the presentation of "Little Boy" at the Japan Society in New York. Finally, throughout 2008 and 2009, he establishes the major retrospective "© MURAKAMI" tribute at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the New York Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The works of Takashi Murakami were presented in the larger art institutions collections: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the XXI century of Kanazawa, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, etc.
Takashi Murakami exceeds the limits of two-dimensionality art and artistic forms close to decorative images by creating Superflat art, a type picture which in many directions exceeds the hierarchy, time and genre peculiarities, and exists with the parallelism of each work and Expressionism box. He continued to create works of art with the idea Superflat and created a new concept for the art trade in the world. It is not only an artist but a gallerist and producer, too. For this exhibition, Murakami has selected the best 5,000 works in its collection using his own creative ideal, ending up with an exhibition of 400 points. Rather than separate and presenting these works in those clusters which already are employed such as "regionality" and "preferably", they are aligned with the arbitrary sense, or sometimes mechanically, which carries the meaning of "Superflat Collection" back to our conscience.
Among the works is the section named "imaginary world of Takashi Murakami," which has paintings of graffiti, antique furniture, a pitcher ceramic beer on the ground, a bowling ball, and other items chaotic implemented. One can discover the strange feeling to look straight in the mind of Takashi Murakami. Giant sculptures and installation art will be displayed in the "Sculpture Garden", and works by Anselm Kiefer and Yoshitomo Nara will also be there.
The "Use Japan, beauty" of the section, which begins with a lineup of documents from the Edo period and calligraphic paintings and oriental ceremonies and modern pottery, includes works of Kitaoji Rosanjin and Soga Shōhaku from which you can see where Murakami's sense of aesthetics comes. In the "1950-2015", major national and international works of art Murakami from the 1950s to today will be exposed. Works by Andy Warhol, Nobuyuki Araki, Kishin Sonoyama, Horst Janssen, Damien Hirst, Friedrich Kunath, and Naoya Hatakeyama will also be exhibited in roughly around the order in which they were made.
In addition, in the "study room and plant" the station, art and teaching art interactive video let one observe and think about how value is created and made and labor and compensation.
As a smokescreen, we leave blinded by the skyrocketing prices achieved by the artist Takashi Murakami, up to two million euros is said to the biggest star of his current exhibition in Paris. When the economic argument tends to extinguish all critical discourse - some saying amen to the power of money, others merely of insufficient "it's too commercial" - it seems necessary to go further near these large paint surfaces, or this great painting surface, wondering why it is we so "expensive" today. Let's start with his masterpiece: 727-272 The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate. The Palazzo Grassi in Venice, François Pinault owns this vast fresco of sixteen paintings where the manga revolves nuclear Apocalypse, in which Orientalism is combined with more abstract moments and radiation crosses a Gerhard Richter, in a chromatic meeting between old Europe and Japanese painting. "a major work of the century", commented in passing his gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, and he has cannot be wrong, especially when you consider this century as one of the "Empire" without outside without altering mode, we prepare globalized capitalism (Cornyetz, 181-195).
The Emergence appears as the most beautiful of his works, much greater than where Murakami merely reproduces the world of manga, this is the name of this brilliant fusion food of the great European abstraction, traditional Japanese painting, and manga post-op. Strictly manga paintings, we find several in the exhibition at Emmanuel Perrotin: Jubilee of naive popism, flowers all smiles made in series, made probably by smaller workers hands of his assistants, they cross this time Japan and the industrialized Warhol's Factory - reference claimed by the artist who created the Factory Hiropon then Kaikai Kiki, "an art-producing company" whose Rei Sato Mr. artists appear as derivatives. Further, panel paintings form yet another cultural mix: the old Tondo of the European tradition is fused with Japanese prints and abstract streaks in the manner of Richter and Polke, all adorned with flowers, the essential ingredient of a painting accessible to perfection and nicely decorative "flower power" in the soul. Very consciously so, Emperor Murakami now produces painting par excellence of economic globalization, and it is in this capacity that is extolled by the financial capitalism and the luxury industry, prompted to print his mark on Louis Vuitton bags.
Murakami is not the painter of postmodernity where all singularities were absolved in hybrid multiculturalism and certainly not that of a global justice movement where various cultures maintain their difference in a solidarity game. No, his paintings are available as the interface of our globalized economy, they are the pictorial equivalent of Google Earth: a planetary and smoothed out where and put together, references, singularities, geographies, and cultures forms the prism of a single civilization.
Takashi Murakami as an Artist
The artist Takashi Murakami appears as a response to Japanese American pop art. Portrait of a business leader is key for everything. Superflat is the concept launched by Takashi Murakami, which sets the Palace of Versailles from September 2011. This is also the level of the exchange with the Japanese artist, whose conversation never took off from the surface. And remember this phrase Warhol: "If you want to know Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings, my films myself, and here I am. There is nothing else behind. "To stop on its smooth works is silly " trashes "Murakami would be a product licked the manga culture. See the leading businessman with an iron hand a company of one hundred and ten employees, the man would adjust Warhol's credo: "Making money is art and working are art and good business is done the most beautiful art ever. "But things are a bit more complex. For behind Murakami, there is the context of Japanese society after the war frustrated, humiliated. This dystopia finds its incarnation in Otakus, people cooped up in their loneliness, obsessively staring at cartoons and video games. Indeed, Murakami would be less than the response of Japanese revenge on the US pop. The son of a Tokyo taxi driver and a housewife, the artist knows an education the hard way. After each exposure visit with his mother, he must write a small text, otherwise, it is private dinner. From the age of five years, the kid swallows manga and dream of working in the animation industry. But it is in classical painting Nihonga that Murakami will make its ranges, without ever losing his fascination with the forms of expression of Otakus. Unlike a Roy Lichtenstein that borrows from comics, the Japanese mean raising the status of manga. In short, linking painting of the Edo era (1600-1868) and the creations of otaku, Murakami dream of a new Japanese a clearly nationalist ambition. For him, the child of the manga aesthetic lays the foundation for contemporary Japanese art, and critical society itself immature (Morse et al., 36).
Warhol made a unprecedented influence on Murakami: mix components of communist propaganda and capitalist advertising were used by the Japaneese artist as a template for further development. He used namely this approach because the artist is sure of its success with lovers of art and western collectors. It is based on the old tradition of political portrait always revisiting the portrait called "official" site. He portrayed personalities at the same level as everyday consumer products through the use of the same technique, screen printing. It is based on photographs widely disseminated by the media of the time when it is not himself who takes them with his polaroid. In doing so, Warhol was able to link the images of these leaders to the great myths of contemporary culture. By this assimilation, Warhol revealed how these famous leaders and risen to the rank of celebrities through their permanent representations in the media. Murakami studied the works of Warhol for many years and he wanted to create on this basement his own original style (CURRIE, 28).
Conquer the world
In the manner of Walt Disney, the artist created characters: Miss Ko in 1997 and, in the process, Hiropon, the name of a prohibited narcotic in Japan since 1952. At the damsel to overflowing breast milk replied the following year My Lonesome Cowboy, young man ejaculating sperm lasso. Schoolboy half man, half android, Inochi revives in 2004 the Japanese fascination with robots. Drafted in 1993, the character of Mr. Dob is a distant cousin of Mickey Mouse. But with time, the figure acquires a nice bright carnivorous grin. To conquer the world, Murakami has included a range of figures but it was not enough. It was also necessary to control mechanisms of the Western market and develop a global strategy key to everything(Murakami, Schimmel and Hebdige, 40). He thus made commercials and handles the communication of billionaire Minoru Mori for the inauguration of the building project in Roppongi Hills in Tokyo. Invited in 2003 by fashion designer Marc Jacobs, it produces several lines of bags for Louis Vuitton (the stylist is artistic director of collections) and became known to the general public. The collaboration with the brand was so important that, when exposed to the MOCA in Los Angeles, in 2007, Murakami has installed a Vuitton boutique. "For Takashi, the memory that people keep an exhibition, it is an object, a T-shirt, postcard, says Paul Schimmel, director of MOCA. Perhaps the store is it the most important element of the exhibition. "The purpose is to break the barriers between popular art, derivatives and fine arts, a little in the idea of Keith Haring's Pop Shop. Except that between a canvas, a figure three hundred copies and a Vuitton bag, there is always a difference: the price (Flatley, 25).
Business Sense
The prey reviews
Its cutesy and commercial aspect has made it the bane of critics. "As for Jeff Koons, some hope that his last show will really last. But he always bounces back, "says Paul Schimmel. In Japan intellectuals, and some cartoonists despite the royally in his latest series of self-portraits, he represented and paunchy older artist, writing on a board that the Japanese were his insipid work. Even his supporters are skeptical. "It's very provocative, he likes to show the ill part of himself. But I think it will again become the artist. I hope so, "said Akira Tatehata, director of the National Museum of Art Osaka."In Japan, I am known as someone who has a sense of humor and talks about funny things on television or radio, sorry Murakami. I'm frustrated for a long time not to be understood in Japan that art is not. "It is nonetheless become an" international monster, "in the words of Jean-Jacques Aillagon, president of Versailles to the point that some have lent him the desire to orchestrate a similar challenge to that of Damien Hirst. "When, in 2008, Damien Hirst orchestrated the sale of his own works, it was a great shot. I will not do it because I will not be the first and it does not interest me, he argues. It's like those who climb up Mount Everest. It is written in stone the name of the first who climbed the mountain, but the following are forgotten. If one day I make a great shot, it will be something else. "
Has he the Japanese conqueror finally taken revenge on his social origins? "It was five years ago, I thought I had taken. But I'm not so sure, he notes. My goal now is how my company can survive. "One even wonders if he did not many projects with the sole aim of maintaining its structure."My only concern is that it is embarking on too many projects, admits Emmanuel Perrotin. I would like it a little cleaning, but it's a marathon. "Although on the surface, the runner is successful, it missed its original target. His work remains as subversive syrupy. Even as he wanted to reveal the specificity of the Japanese post-modern culture, it ultimately highlights its Americanization. Facing the empire images of Uncle Sam, he offered other figures, hybrids, without providing the signs or directions. Takashi Murakami is not an artificer. He knows just to dazzle the eyes (CURRIE, 13).
Murakami's art at first glance may seem very complex, and that covers a wide range of media as described in the Superflat. However, as the link between his various works, we can highlight the color treatment based on the traditional painting. This is applied flat and usually has a limited range. His work has been compared many times with American pop art, both in terms of content and aesthetic level. And it is that both Andy Warhol, leading exponent of American pop art, as Takashi Murakami, have been based on the popular culture of their environment to create his work. The image processing, based on spot colors, has great similarities. The game makes the scale, creating large works, or series of the same piece in a small format, drink largely influences Jeff Koons, who is based in magnifying everyday objects thanks to its size (Shanes, 51). Among its most prominent icons, we can find mushrooms and flowers to skulls, icons belonging to the Buddhist tradition. In contrast, highly sexualized of otaku culture figures are also shown. Among his works as well as paintings and sculptures, we can find tapestries, installations, performances, animated works, posters, and merchandise.
In short, Takashi Murakami is one of the great artists of the past decades, who can find both in a video clip as an illustration. With groundbreaking works, he has transgressed the traditional differences between types art high or low level, creating its own meaning for the term. From there, he has created his own aesthetic that although he approaches other great masters of art as Koons or Warhol, has a unique identity that combines Japanese tradition with the great influences of the West.
Works cited:
Cornyetz, Nina. "Murakami Takashi And The Hell Of Others: Sexual (In)Difference, The Eye, And The Gaze In <I>©Murakami</I>". Criticism 54.2 (2012): 181-195. Web.
CURRIE, CHRISTOPHER. "Andy Warhol: Enigma, Icon, Master". Semiotica 80.3-4 (1990): n. pag. Web.
Flatley, Jonathan. "Jonathan Flatley. Review Of "Andy Warhol: Photography" By Candace Breitz And "Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York" By Gordon Baldwin And Judith Keller.". caa.reviews (2000): n. pag. Web.
Morse, Anne Nishimura et al. Arts Of Japan. Boston: MFA Publications, 2008. Print.
Murakami, Takashi, Paul Schimmel, and Dick Hebdige. © Murakami. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007. Print.
Shanes, Eric. Pop Art. New York, NY: Parkstone, 2009. Print.
