Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist, born in Tokyo in 1962, who holds a doctorate in traditional Japanese painting. He is known for smiling flowers, a cartoon character called Mr. DOB and a theory he named Superflat. He put his designs on Louis Vuitton bags in 2003 and on a Kanye West album cover in 2007.
The flowers and the handbags come from the same man, and from the same plan. The plan began in a school that trained him to paint like a Japanese master.
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Murakami went to the Tokyo University of the Arts intending to become an animator. He majored in nihonga, the school of Japanese painting that carries the older techniques, and in 1993 he earned a doctorate in it.
He soon turned against the world he had trained for. In 2001 he looked back on what came next and said that he had set out to investigate "the secret of market survivability." The subject of that research was the art market.
Japan was slow to follow. When the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo gave him a solo show in 2015, it was his first in his own country in fourteen years. Eight years earlier, a museum in Los Angeles had opened his retrospective with a fully functional Louis Vuitton boutique inside it.
What You'll Discover
Why he walked away from nihonga.
What Superflat claims about Japan.
Where the smiling flowers come from.
What a handbag was doing in a museum.
Who a hundred meters of paint thanked.
Where to see his work today.