Fashion's continuing obsession with Takashi Murakami

Straits Times

21-05-2025

Artist Takashi Murakami in front of his Flowers series, ahead of his exhibition, Stepping On The Tail Of A Rainbow, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in April. PHOTO: DUSTIN FRANZ/NYTIMES
CLEVELAND – Takashi Murakami sat dashing off a portrait of artist Shahzia Sikander, one of several high-profile personalities he would sketch that afternoon in late April in advance of his new exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, the United States.
Cameras clicked and whirred, focused less on his subjects than on the artist himself, who was kitted out for the occasion in a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a loose-fitting frock coat and an outsize helmet that lent him the look of a rainbow-crested chicken.
The peripatetic Tokyo-based artist, entrepreneur, cultural critic and self-styled brand had arrived in the wee hours to oversee the installation of his exhibition Stepping On The Tail Of A Rainbow, set to open to the public on May 25 , complete with a true-to-scale replica of a portion of an ancient temple at Nara in Japan.
But Murakami, 63, seemed to take the moment in stride, sketching tirelessly as a small crowd craned to take in his performance.
His playfully eccentric get-up was conceived partly to captivate his followers. They are the critics, collectors, hypebeasts and, at least as ardently, a world of tastemakers and style setters – among them singer-songwriters Usher and Pharrell Williams, and fashion entrepreneur Sarah Andelman – who travel in his orbit.
Some have embraced him as a puckishly endearing mascot, the irreverent embodiment of his daftly cartoonish characters. Those with deep pockets collect his work. Others, for whom high art is out of reach, snap up one in a steady proliferation of small-scale interpretations of his most familiar pieces: the trinkets, T-shirts, housewares and handbags that serve as a relatively accessible form of brand extension.
His image, a variation on the manga and anime and emoji-inspired characters that populate his work, is strategic.
'Takashi is a style icon, aware of the role an artist can play in a public sphere,' said Mr Sky Gellatly, who forged relationships between Murakami and a number of artists and lifestyle brands. 'His attention to the details of his outfits are part of a holistic expression for his work and his collaborations.'
Well aware of some followers' cult-like enthusiasm, the artist himself is loath to let them down. 'In a competitive world, there are just two choices,' he said.
'You can make a new movement,' he explained, referring to Superflat, a Murakami coinage for a pop-infused movement that erodes the distinction between fine art and commodity. 'Or you can be the new guy.'
'That is why every two years, I change my style,' he said. 'That way, the audience may be thinking, 'Oh, this is not boring.''
Small chance. Indeed, Murakami is having a buzzworthy year. His show in Cleveland is an expanded version of one in 2022 at the Broad in Los Angeles.
He exhibited with Gagosian in London and, in May, arrived to take in his show at Gagosian in Manhattan. The exhibition – Japonisme, Cognitive Revolution – inspired by traditional Japanese art, highlights Murakami's interpretation of prints by the 19th-century master Utagawa Hiroshige.
All of this is to say nothing of the recent outpouring of Murakami brand collaborations. They include, most prominently, the reissue and update of his 2003 collection of handbags and accessories first conceived with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton. The new collection, unveiled in January in partnership with Williams, the creative director of menswear for the luxury brand, is modelled by A merican singer-actress Zendaya .
Takashi Murakami in the Reid Gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His exhibition, titled Stepping On The Tail Of A Rainbow, opened to the public on May 25.
PHOTO: DUSTIN FRANZ/NYTIMES
The artist is candidly pleased with its success. 'I had very good luck with the first collaboration,' he said. 'If sales are good this time, it is a great way of expanding my work and promoting my name. It's kind of a win-win.'
In spring, he released a Major League Baseball collection celebrated with pop-ups in Los Angeles and Tokyo and sold through Complex stores. At Frieze in May , he introduced limited-edition, panda-decorated platters in support of the Coalition for the Homeless.
To some, his high-end goods are out of reach. (The Vuitton monogram bags sell for as much as US$5,000 or S$6,500.) But fans flock to hi s shows just the same.
Art world professionals view the artist as a trailblazer. 'His landmark 2003 collaboration with Louis Vuitton redefined the possibilities of fashion-art partnerships, introducing a new visual economy in which luxury, playfulness and critique could co-exist,' said Mr Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator for fashion and material culture for the Brooklyn Museum.
Murakami has collaborated with many brands, with one of the most recent being the January 2025 reissue and update of his 2003 collection of handbags and accessories first conceived with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton.
PHOTO: DUSTIN FRANZ/NYTIMES
In Cleveland, Murakami sat obligingly in front of Hustle'n'Punch By Kaikai And Kiki, one of his most familiar works.
The artist, who tends to speak in densely packed paragraphs, confided that he struggled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder . He closed his eyes as he spoke, the better to marshal his thoughts. His zany costume notwithstanding, he was in no mood to clown.
'W hile on the surface, the works in this show might seem beautiful and cheerful, w hen I'm creating my work, I'm very much influenced by the spirit of the moment,' he said. 'This retrospective and the works I've just completed and those I will continue to show visibly reflect the mood of the times.'
He was deeply influenced by Japanese artist Hiroshige's serenely nostalgic woodblock prints, he said, in particular the One Hundred Famous Views Of Edo (now Tokyo), made in the aftermath of an earthquake that had decimated the city.
Murakami's work addresses the historical traumas that affected his youth and continue to trouble him, chief among them the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War and, later, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the Covid-19 pandemic.
'Today, tensions with China are also being reflected in my work,' he said.
Yet, it is useless, he argued, to try to impose meaning on his canvases. His images come from within, he said. 'They can't be directly related to anything in existing culture.' The idea, he said, is to sever links with reality while remaining practical.
'Making art is a job,' he said, 'and I am in a rush.'
Murakami – who employs some 300 people at Kaikai Kiki, his studio in Japan – is impelled to increase and vary his output. His urgency is intensified, he said, by a sense of impending mortality and a dread that he may eventually the suffer fate of his father, who battled Alzheimer's.
' These days, I am very fearful of not becoming myself,' he said.
He has found alternative means of self-expression, some that extend beyond the frame.
The upcoming Yumedono, or Hall of Dreams, is a recreation of the Horyuji Temple in Nara, Japan, and will be located in the atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
PHOTO: DUSTIN FRANZ/NYTIMES
He worked with the set designers of the television series Shogun (2024 to present) to recreate the Yumedono, or Hall of Dreams, of the Horyuji Temple at Nara. Still under construction at this writing, with workers clambering over its framework, it is positioned to greet visitors entering the museum in Cleveland.
Shogun itself moved the artist profoundly. 'It depicted a time of civil war and how in that time people were always living facing death,' he said.
He was struck by the show's exploration of hara-kiri, the Japanese ritual suicide. The act is accompanied by the recitation of a poem that summarised and placed meaning on one's life, he explained. 'It meant ending one's life in a controlled way.'
'My death poem is my art,' he said. NYTIMES
Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.