In the gentrified kitsch landscape Takashi Murakami depicts, 500 grotesque priests parade along dazzlingly colorful giant panels.
The artist’s zany ukiyoe-turned-manga world takes a spiritual, but uncompromising pop art, turn in addressing the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. But the old men in The 500 Arhats installation at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo also show reality in the world’s fastest aging society.
“This is a self-portrait of Japan,” Murakami told the AP this week.
Photo: AP/ Eugene Hoshiko
Dubbed the “Andy Warhol of Japan,” Murakami is showing his first major retrospective in Japan in 14 years.
After the Fukushima disaster, Murakami felt a need to express the sense of desperation and catastrophe, and to try to contribute to healing.
The motif of Buddha’s disciples is common in traditional Japanese art. But Murakami’s arhat figures leer back at the world, some with toothless grins, as though stuck in half-crazed greed rather than seeking enlightenment.
Photo: AP/ Eugene Hoshiko
The giant panels, 100 meters long in total, are covered with raging fire and glitter-speckled cosmic skies. Dragons strike contorted poses, next to elephants and a white tiger. And there are lots and lots of aging men, of various sizes and shapes, with pot bellies, bald heads and wrinkled foreheads.
“In another era, I’d be a grandpa,” said Murakami, 53. “My art has always been about exaggerating the weird characteristics of Japanese society.”
Murakami uses dozens of assistants to create large-scale artworks — often with repetitive themes, be it laughing flowers, psychedelic skulls or deformed old men. They work in his version of Warhol’s Factory, though he stresses gorgeous celebrities don’t frequent the studio that’s run more like a humble Japanese manufacturing company.
His signature icon is the Mickey Mouse-like Mr Dob. Murakami has also created huge erotic sculptures of animation-inspired female figures that have fetched enormous auction prices. In recent years, he has become a filmmaker.
FROM RAGS TO US$4,000 TOTE BAGS
Murakami has won both praise and criticism for his unabashed commercialism, starting his own brand Kaikai Kiki Co, which sells not just the usual postcards and art books, but also mugs, cushions, cellphone cases and T-shirts emblazoned with his designs, as well as figures and dolls.
In his typically defiance, Murakami recommends exhibit viewers keep their serious spirituality to about 30 percent of their energy, and revel in tourism, splurging and fun for the rest.
The official shop that’s part of the exhibit is taking orders for a US$4,000 tote bag with Murakami’s skull design, complete with a certificate.
Murakami designed Louis Vuitton bags about a decade ago that sold for similarly exorbitant prices, although Murakami acknowledged at the time he had never owned such an expensive bag in his life.
At the museum coffee shop, where walls are splashed with Murakami flowers and his balloon figures hang from the ceiling, visitors enjoy a selection of cakes and omelets in flower shapes.
At the entrance stands a striking life-size likeness of Murakami, with rolling eyes and moving lips — except the top face is peeling off to reveal yet another face — an eerie reminder that art, like life and truth, can be illusory.
But Murakami insists neither time nor fame has changed him as an artist.
He grew up poor, he said. Japan was in a perpetual identity crisis, having just been defeated in World War II.
A graduate of the prestigious Tokyo University of the Arts, he went on to invent his approach and named it Superflat — a take on that unique sense of perspective and emphasis of clear outlines that woodblock printers like Hokusai invented.
It all comes back, Murakami said, to the question he has addressed all his life: What is Japan?
“Superflat has not changed at all,” he said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located