Global artistic powerhouse Takashi Murakami reveals his highs and lows

South China Morning Post

22-03-2025

It's not yet 9am, but
Takashi Murakami is already grappling with life's more stark realities, reckoning with the possibility of cognitive decline in his later years. 'I tend to be depressed and can't think of happy, good thoughts too much,' he tells me over a video call during his morning walk before heading to his studio in Saitama, just north of Tokyo. 'The only time I feel comforted is when I'm making my own work.'
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Murakami barely needs an introduction, his visual language possibly the most recognisable aesthetic of any living artist today. Mention his name and rainbow-hued flowers and faces plastered with grins drift across one's inner field of vision.
Murakami is known equally for his prolific collaborations, with brands (Louis Vuitton, Crocs and Supreme), musicians (Billie Eilish and Pharrell Williams), and even an art historian (Nobuo Tsuji), his commerciality frequently clashing with the historically informed origins of his style. Murakami holds a PhD in late 19th century Japanese Nihonga style of painting. But it is his ability to translate classical Japanese aesthetics into the visual language of popular culture that often defines this self-described geek, who holds as deep a knowledge of anime as he does Hokusai.
The late fashion designer
Virgil Abloh , a former collaborator, once described Murakami as 'the only person in the world who works harder than me'.
Portrait of Takashi Murakami. Photo: ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
It's not difficult to understand why. In 2024 alone, the Japanese artist's activities included exhibitions at Kyoto's Kyocera Museum, London's Gagosian gallery and New York's Brooklyn Museum. For the latter, Murakami created 121 works in just five months – 'In many cases it's a miracle that the ink's dry,' Joan Cummins, the Brooklyn Museum's curator of Asian art, remarked when the exhibition, 'Hiroshige's 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami)', opened last April. This May will see the opening of two solo shows in the United States, at Gagosian's New York branch and at the Cleveland Museum of Art.