Takashi Murakami B. 1962

Executed in 2001, this work is unique.

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami

Exh. Cat., Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (and traveling), Kaikai Kiki: Takashi Murakami, 2002 (Flower Matango (b))
Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art (and traveling), ©Murakami, 2007, pp. 152-155, illustrated in color

A twig on branch #9 with a pair of flowers, one yellow and the other orange and white, is broken off. A twig on branch #3 with a pair of flowers, one green and the other blue and white, is also broken off.
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Takashi Murakami's Flower Matango (a) (Lot 21), from 2001 is a large scale and stunning example of how Japan's foremost contemporary artist can merge his traditional Japanese training and background with contemporary culture.  The present sculpture becomes a fairy-tale like creature, sprouting vines, covered entirely with brightly colored flowers, and smiling out at the viewer.  The effect is a visual and cerebral amalgam of High (fine art) and Low (popular) art.  High art is here absorbed by popular culture and in particular cartoons and video games (called Anime and Manga in Japan).  Murakami and other Japanese  anime artists have found a new way to elevate, yet again, the use of logos and commercial marketing images that, at the same time, have become the cultural norm.  Murakami's original aesthetic related to the pre-eminent anime and manga visual cultures of 1980s Japan, but developed to deal in otaku, which describes a computer-based, virtual lifestyle that becomes a substitute to reality.  However, from the mid 1990s, Murakami moved away from the more confrontational, aggressive and sexual atmosphere of otaku and started to embrace the cute cartoon style of kawaii as a subtler medium for his contemporary socio-cultural scrutiny.  Emblematic of this change in direction was the name change of his studio in 2001 from the 'Hiropon' factory to 'Kaikai Kiki'.  Murakami has declared that "Japanese don't like serious art.  But if I can transform cute characters into serious art, they will love my piece." (Arthur Lubow, 'The Murakami Method', The New York Times, April 3, 2005)  Representing the artist's immersion kawaii, Flower Matango (a) is the distilled incarnation of this project, simultaneously standing as something quirky and undeniably appealing, as well as a brilliantly pithy comment on the influential effect of branded dream-worlds in contemporary culture.

Murakami began painting flowers when he was preparing for his entrance into the University of Fine Arts, Tokyo.  After getting his PhD in Nihon-ga, a traditional Japanese style of painting in which flowers are a constant motif, he started to teach painting and drawing at a local preparatory school.  In his own words, Murakami explains how flowers became a part of his oeuvre, "When I was preparing for the entrance exams for the University of Fine Arts, I spent two years drawing flowers.  I drew some every day.  And the entrance exam in the Nihon-ga section also involved flower drawing.  Afterwards, to earn a living, I spent nine years working in a preparatory school, where I taught the students to draw flowers.  Once every two days, I would buy flowers for my lesson and make compositions for the students to work on.  At the beginning, to be frank, I didn't like flowers, but as I continued teaching in the school, my feelings changed: their smell, their shape – it all made me feel almost physically sick, and at the same time I found them very 'cute'.  Each one seems to have its own feelings, its own personality." (Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Takashi Murakami, Paris, 2002, p. 84) 

The hundreds of googly-eyes  in Flower Matango seem to stare out at the viewer from a happy, yet extremely crowded ball and reach out to the viewer from the tangling vines.  By using his reoccurring motif of eyes, the ever-present gaze coming out of Murakami's sculpture does at once feel slightly unnerving but also somewhat joyful.  The artist's flower ball paintings do not quite have the same overwhelming feeling as the sculptures.  The paintings are manageable and contained within the canvas frame, whereas the present work appears that it could continue to grow wild and take over the viewer's space-smiling all the while.  Murakami's personified flower faces stare out at the viewer in a barrage of color and form.  Instead of using the Western technique of having one focal point, Murakami instead uses the traditional Eastern method of a multiplicity of points of entrance.  The viewer can view the present sculpture from any angle. 

Seemingly unbridled and even unruly, the piece is a product of an absurdly high level of craftsmanship and a tenacious commitment to engineering precision.  It is also a testimony to the many years of hard work and relentless art-making by the Kaikai Kiki Factory, led by Murakami himself.  Ever since its early stages of operations, the factory has been building an epic database of all its invented figures and characters, such as the mushrooms, the eyes and of course, the flowers.  Every single flower boasting its own unique, designated colour combination has been assigned a serial number.  For this sculpture, Murakami and his team of artists have laboured to arrive at the perfect arrangement of flowers that would seamlessly complement each other.  The final solution can only be described as visually stunning.  The variation in sizes for the flowers and their leaves is also intentional and specified, bearing a ratio that must be maintained consistently.  The path of the tendrils, furthermore, is a result of Bézier curves, which are generated using an advanced computer graphic software program.  A painstaking effort has been taken to create the perfect angles, beautiful curvatures and delightful chromatic contrasts so that an overall balance and the impression of kawaii may be best achieved.  Flower Matango (a) demands an amount of hard work that is more than meets the eye and has taken up to an astonishing year-and-a-half to complete.

Although heavily influenced by old Eastern tradition, Murakami was also profoundly influenced by more modern art masters, most notably Andy Warhol.  Just as Warhol created a 'Factory' from which most of his works were created, so too did Murakami.  The Kaikai Kiki Corporation employs a multitude of assistants who specialize in color mixing, painting, and computer drawing, among other things.  A notable similarity between the artists can be seen in the present work.  Here Murakami repeats the flower motif used in many of his other works – his earliest of these being Cosmos, from 1995.  Although he used the motif in many paintings and sculptures, like Warhol, Murakami never repeated the same composition only the grinning flower character and Warhol the source image of a flower from a mass produced advertisement.  Amada Cruz notes, "The sense of motion and character in Murakami's paintings derives from the conventions of animation, compared to the stillness of Warhol's, which derives from a photograph." (Exh. Cat., Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of Nonsense of the Meaning, June 1999, p. 18)

Direct comparisons can also be drawn between Murakami and his contemporary, Jeff Koons.  Scott Rothkopf notes in the catalogue from the recent exhibition ãMurakami, "[Jeff Koons'] has succeeded in winning over an equally broad audience with icons such as his topiary puppies and glistening balloon dogs.  Yet although he shares with Murakami a love of publicity, analogous modes of studio fabrication, and, above all, a magpie infatuation with the culture industry's effluence, Koons has shown almost no interest in moving beyond (or below) the production of objects that circulate in the most rarified market climes." (Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art (and traveling), ãMurakami, 2007, p. 142)  Murakami is often billed as the next Andy Warhol.  Like the American pop art icon, he fuses High and Low art by incorporating imagery from consumer culture to produce visually arresting and highly original work.  A brilliant self-promoter, Murakami's renown has extended outside of Japan with exhibitions in major European and American museums and has received copious favorable worldwide media attention.