Takashi Murakami
Founder of Superflat.
Takashi Murakami unites ukiyo-e, manga and anime with the art market and has collaborated with fashion houses and musicians.
Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1962. He grew up with anime and manga but trained in traditional Japanese painting, nihonga, at the Tokyo University of the Arts, where he received his doctorate in 1993. He soon felt caught between rigid tradition and Western contemporary art and sought a way to unite Japanese history with present-day popular culture.
In the 1990s he created the character Mr. DOB, a kind of alter ego with mouse ears who recurs in his work. He also made sculptures in manga and anime style, such as Hiropon from 1997 and My Lonesome Cowboy from 1998, which mocked the sexualised figures of fan culture. My Lonesome Cowboy sold in 2008 for around 15 million dollars, a record for him.
In 2000–01 he launched the concept of Superflat through an exhibition and a manifesto. The idea is that Japanese visual culture, from old painted scrolls and ukiyo-e to anime, is built on flat surfaces without depth, and that the boundless mixing of high and popular culture says something about modern Japan. The exhibition Little Boy in New York in 2005 linked the same visual world to the atomic bombs and the post-war era.
Murakami runs the company Kaikai Kiki, a workshop with many assistants that produces his works, handles merchandise and promotes younger artists. He collaborated with Louis Vuitton from 2003 and designed the album cover for Kanye West's Graduation in 2007. His smiling flowers appear on everything from paintings to key rings. His exhibition at the Palace of Versailles in 2010 provoked protests, and his commercial strategy has often been criticised.
His later works include the hundred-metre-long painting The 500 Arhats from 2012, a response to the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Murakami has been of great importance for the way contemporary art, brands and the market are intertwined, and he is counted among the most influential Japanese artists since the Second World War.