Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami – Art studies in Tokyo, dispute with the Otaku subculture

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo on 1 February 1962. His tendency to fine art initially led him conventionally to the Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku, one of the most esteemed art schools in Japan. There he studied Nihonga, traditional Japanese painting. After graduating with a Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts, he also earned his doctorate and studied extensively the Japanese subculture of Otaku, which is essentially understood to mean the dedicated fan scene of Japanese animated films (animes) and comics (manga). The success of this media also in the West, namely the USA, inspired Takashi Murakami to examine the obvious and hidden contradictions between traditional Japanese social order and Western pop culture. The artistic treatment of the cult of cuteness, strongly pronounced amongst the Otaku people, was perceived in parts as provocation, but also brought the artist international recognition and ultimately led to the emergence of the Japanese art movement, Superflat. Takashi Murakami also sees the contemporary culture of his native Japan as superflat, which he accuses of cultural impotence. 

The aim is the rediscovery of Japan’s spiritual roots

Takashi Murakami does not shy away from drastic, partly pornographic images to express his message and criticism: We see a cowboy ejaculating a whirling lasso, or a female figure skipping rope with a stream of milk coming from her breast. This stark imagery is jarring, and that is Takashi Murakami’s aim, to explode what he sees as the ubiquitous shallowness and rigidity within Japanese society. He identifies the Second World War as a key moment - the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which caused Japan’s social structures and hierarchies to break apart without ever really being reconstituted. For Takashi Murakami, this event and its consequences as well as the Japanese refusal to openly discuss their own responsibility in the devastating events of war, became a defining theme. The decline of education, the increasing loss of identity, all these are developments and currents that Murakami opposes. Otaku culture exemplifies all of this, as a group that considers itself elitist and does not want to grow up. At the same time, the artist does not despise children, but values them as his audience. 

The destiny of the true artist is immortality

Takashi Murakami enjoys the security his immense financial success affords, and the possibilities it enables. However, he does not want to attach immediate significance to his fame; it is not the personal glory of the moment that interests him, but the perspective beyond his own death. Murakami longs for immortality and wishes to create a work that will outlast him and endure far into the future. The declared perfectionist subordinates everything to his work; he often sleeps for weeks in the studio with his employees during the final phase of an artwork. In his early days, he admired Andy Warhol, wanted to copy his Factory, and today openly admits his admiration for Hollywood directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who have managed to dissolve the boundaries between children and adults for the duration of a visit to the cinema. 

Takashi Murakami lives and works primarily in Tokyo and New York.