Takashi Murakami trained in classical Japanese painting, then put his art on handbags
A Tokyo painter with a doctorate in Nihonga ended up designing Louis Vuitton bags, Kanye West's Graduation cover and plush toys. Takashi Murakami argues that Japan never drew a hard line between art and commerce, so he refuses to draw one either, and his Superflat theory explains why.
Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami grew up loving anime and manga and wanted to become an animator. He enrolled at Tokyo University of the Arts to learn drafting, yet majored in Nihonga, the traditional Japanese painting style, finishing a master's in 1988 and a Ph.D. in 1993. By then he found that world insular and political, and turned toward contemporary methods. Early pieces mocked what he saw as Japan's habit of borrowing Western trends, and he invented a morphing cartoon figure, Mr. DOB, that became a kind of self-portrait.
A 1994 fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council took him to the PS1 studio programme in New York for a year, where Jeff Koons and Anselm Kiefer made a strong impression. In 1996 he founded the Hiropon Factory, a workshop modelled on the atelier system familiar from Japanese printmaking and from anime houses like Studio Ghibli. It became the company Kaikai Kiki in 2001.
His big idea arrived in 2000 in the catalogue for Superflat, a show he curated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He traced a line of flat, two-dimensional imagery from older Japanese art into manga and anime, and claimed postwar Japanese society had flattened too, blurring high and low taste. He then acted on it: subcultural imagery went into the gallery, and gallery work came back out as T-shirts and toys.
Marc Jacobs invited him to work with Louis Vuitton in 2002, and his reworked monogram bags sold hugely and made him a celebrity at home. A retrospective touring from 2007 to 2009 even included a working Vuitton shop. In 2008 Time named him among its 100 most influential people, the only visual artist on the list, and in 2010 he became the first Japanese artist to show at Versailles, filling 15 rooms. Asked about straddling art and commerce, he said he prefers to think of it as moving the line.
Source: Takashi Murakami
