Takashi Murakami

b. 1962

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo, Japan. His creations defy traditional classifications within an art historical context by blurring the division between high and low art. Using traditional western cannons and drawing inspiration from anime, manga, and kawaii, Murakami has been able to work in painting, digital, and commercial media to create his own style, one which comments on otaku lifestyle and subculture, consumerism, and sexual fetishism.

He studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and pursued a doctorate in Nihonga. Murakami is credited as the founder of the Superflat movement, a postmodern style defined by flattened forms in Japanese graphic art, animation, and pop culture which has become a branded art phenomenon is Western culture. His inspiration for starting the movement was in a variety of eccentric Ukiyo-e artists and Yoshinori Kanada's dragon sequence in the anime film Harmagedon (1983).

What sets Murakami apart are his methods of production and the location of his pieces. While his work is of his own conception, it is executed by a studio of assistants, much of it being mass produced. His work is not exhibited exclusively in galleries but can be found in many in a variety of locations ranging from toy stores, candy aisles, comic book stores, and the French design house of Louis Vuitton. Murakami's style is an amalgam of his Western predecessors, Warhol, Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein as well as Japanese predecessors and contemporaries of otaku. His sculptures are larger than life, illustrating explicit sexuality in form and are often made of fiberglass, most notably Hiropon and My Lonesome Cowboy. The self reflexive nature of Murakami’s oeuvre by exploring his own identity through an investigation of branding identity has made contemporary Japanese art relevant in the modern art world again.