TAKASHI MURAKAMI | Pink Circus: Embrace Peace and Darkness within Thy Heart

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant and the illustration fails to convey the glitter apparent in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Through his unmistakable idiom of candy-coloured flowers menacingly interspersed with partly-concealed skulls, Takashi Murakami conjures in Pink Circus: Embrace Peace and Darkness within Thy Heart what feels to the viewer like an infinitely extendable, polychromatic world of vivid acrylic colour and implacable energy. With dizzying exuberance, Murakami uses his ‘Superflat’ aesthetic to permute, on a single representational field, Pop transmutations of the Chrysanthemum and the skull: important symbols in ancient Japanese iconography. In its literal, visual ‘flattening’ of the putative polarities of high/low, Western/Asian, and contemporary/ancient art, the present work enacts a rapturous celebration of life, its ephemerality, and its inevitable decay; suggesting – like centuries of Japanese art before it – the mutual entailment of these supposedly opposed entities. Murakami draws deeply on Japan’s dark and turbulent history, but filters these reminiscences through a redemptive optimism expressed in a distinctively Japanese vocabulary. Takashi Murakami is venerated for having reinvigorated Japanese art in the late Twentieth Century. His subversive and pioneering ‘Superflat’ style has been described by Nina Cornyetz as an “attempt to reanimate a pre-Westernised, putatively indigenous, Japanese artistic perspective in forms that simultaneously accommodate a thoroughly Westernised popular culture” (Nina Cornyetz, ‘Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others: Sexual (In)Difference, the Eye, and the Gaze in Murakami’, Criticism, Vol. 54, No. 2, Spring 2012, p. 182). The distinction between art and commerce – the profound and the superficial – is one of the most significant of those levelled by the artist’s visual plane. Acquiring fame in the West through collaborations with Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, and Kanye West, the artist has astutely commented that “in the art world, critics always connect entertainment with guilt, amusement and superficiality. I think my work is the answer to that criticism. Which doesn’t mean that I work only to amuse. Taking architecture as an analogy, you could say that my paintings are like buildings: on the surface, they appear very light and flimsy, but they’re actually made of very solid materials underneath. The depth is visual” (Takashi Murakami, Murakami - Ego, New York 2012, p. 256).

While the present work feels ultra-modern, suggesting creation by means of new media or digital technology, many of its salient properties – such as its duplication of bright, stencilled symbols of the natural world across an aperspectival monoplane – deliberately recall the decorative seventeenth-century textiles, lacquerware, and ceramic work created in the traditional Japanese Rinpa style. Murakami possesses a doctorate in traditional Japanese painting, and it is no surprise that the present work bears notable thematic parallels with both ancient Japanese and eighteenth-century Edo art. Certain principles of Ikebana are exemplified, as the spatial arrangement of the symbols for life’s fragility is used as a potent means by which to heighten the viewer’s experience of beauty. Murakami also takes on the history of the Western gaze on Japanese art and culture through the present work. Satirising the Japonisme movement of the late Nineteenth Century, in which Japan and its artefacts became greatly fashionable and were thus incorporated and mythologized in the work of Western artists, Murakami creates a sickly-sweet, all-over, glut of distinctly contemporary Japanese icons.

Murakami derived the crucial impetus for the present work while teaching art at a preparatory school. Having repeatedly painted flowers as a student of traditional Japanese painting, when he became a teacher of this art, Murakami felt a certain reticence towards flowers as a subject. Today the artist’s feelings towards flowers are complicated; it is a relationship that bore the seeds for the duality in tone exemplified by the present work: “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 physically sick, and at the same time I found them very ‘cute’” (Takashi Murakami in conversation with Hélène Kelmachter in: Exh. Cat., Paris, Serpentine Gallery, Takashi Murakami, 2002, p. 84). Murakami’s attribution of faces to the flowers reflects their uncanny personification for him at this time: “Each one seemed to have its own feelings, its own personality. My dominant feeling was one of unease, but I liked that sensation” (Ibid., p. 84). This in turn exemplifies the duality of his art: beguiling cuteness built upon a very real understanding of the historical darkness and deep traditions that lie beneath the surface of contemporary Japanese culture.