Art Review: Takashi Murakami 村上隆: Unfamiliar People — Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego
If I have to summarize the latest exhibit by Takashi Murakami at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, in one word. It will be “irony”. The exhibit is partially filled with irony and hypocrisy, but also with an emerging beauty developing.
Murakami started the “superflat” art movement, with his theory developed in 2000. In this essay, he argues for returning to the legacy of flat, 2D, on the surface, solid simple color in traditional Japanese art, also called Nihonga. This is the field he studied and earned a PhD earlier in his life, but later on decided to flee from “its insular and highly political environment.”
Superflat is also both a critique of the shallowness and emptiness in post war Japanese consumerism but also a promotion of the idea to “flatten” “high” and “low” art. Reading this essay, you can also viscerally feel the anger he had towards the hegemony of western high art and the misguided homogenisation of Japanese high art trying to mimic their western peers.
Murakami believes in only this flattening and hybridity of low and high, of east and west, contemporary and traditional can free creativity and claim a unique space for Japanese contemporary art.
I think it is exactly at this point, Murakami failed earlier in his career. The smiley flower, especially the sculpture as his salute to Jeff Koons, is utterly insufficient. It didn’t reach the height of Koon’s simulationism, yet also lacked the nuanced melancholy message he is trying to deliver. (A better smile is that perverted smile in Park Chan-Wook’s <Old boy>)
The collaboration with Marc Jacobs on the Louis Vuitton bag not only lacks sophistication but marks the beginning of decay of his artistic authenticity in early 2000s. I think Murakami surrenders to consumerism rather than trying to reform it. It did elevate his fame to the peak especially in Asia with that ubiquitous Louis Vuitton bag. But all these did nothing to help with super-flatterning. His animated music video for Kanye West’s <Good morning>, further blemished by Kanye’s hyper-egotistical lyrics, is cringy at best.
Overall, his early 2000s work achieved the opposite of what “superflat” movements set out to do. Murakami said he wants to NOT straddle the boundary but to “change the line”, and successfully did so by achieving neither.
However, his more recent work, from the late 2010s to now has shown a sense of “re-grounding”. Part of that, as he mentioned in interviews, is due to deeper reflection from disasters that hit Japan: earthquake, tsunami, and of course the pandemic. I think he is finally returning to the original intention and vision of “superflat” by embracing “home”. The home he tried so hard to run away from.
In both <Bacon: Scream>, <Homage to Francis Bacon> in companion with <Tan Tan Bo Black Bacon>, the painting not only shows admiration of Francis Bacon, Expressionism and surrealism artist but also is able to laugh at itself. A true hybrid beauty by “superflatterning”.
In <Judgement day>, <Red Demon and Blue Demon with 48 Arhats>, <Isle of the Dead>, 村上隆 blend Buddhist iconography, Otaku 御宅族’s hyper sexual obsession, familiar pop cultural elements and of course flat solid colors, into a much more complex work requiring both cultural and aesthetical deeper examination.
And even his collaboration with Billie Elish, of her 2019 song <You should see me in a crown> not only gives me sonic and visual pleasure but just is fluent in his own authentic expression, now more comfortable in this real space of superflat-ness.
In observing <Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego>, he flattened his own ego and gave space for authentic originality to arise.
