Latest news with #Nihonga
South China Morning Post
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Global artistic powerhouse Takashi Murakami reveals his highs and lows
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.' Advertisement 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.
New York Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Takashi Murakami's Beloved, Trippy Louis Vuitton Bags Are Back
The 63-year-old Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, the oldest son of a taxi driver and a homemaker, grew up in a one-room apartment in northern Tokyo. As a child, he'd accompany his parents on trips to the National Museum of Western Art. (He's said that, after a visit, he'd have to write a report about what he'd seen or be denied dinner.) In the 1980s, he studied the late 19th-century Japanese painting style Nihonga at Tokyo University of the Arts, but found the practice frustrating. Experimenting with anime and manga, which had fascinated him since childhood, he eventually started creating psychedelic paintings and sculptures of smiling flowers, googly-eyed mushrooms and cartoonish characters with names like Mr. DOB and Miss Ko2. In 2002, Murakami was invited to meet with Marc Jacobs, the artistic director of Louis Vuitton at the time. Although the artist has said he hadn't heard of the company, he accepted the offer. Following a brief encounter in Paris, Jacobs, who had an image of Miss Ko2 pinned to his office wall, asked Murakami to work with the house's 1896 monogram print, the familiar interlocking 'L' and 'V' initials in a serif font and a trio of floral motifs that were themselves likely inspired by the decorative symbols found in Japanese family crests. For the brand's spring 2003 collection, Murakami embellished items like the Pochette handbag with panda and pink cherry blossom motifs and added 33 new colors to the signature brown pattern. Earlier this year, the French label released the first installment of a two-part Louis Vuitton x Murakami re-edition, which will include more than 170 pieces with hypervivid prints that nod to the original collaboration. Murakami's Superflat Panda design is back — this time on skateboards and square trunks — and the rounded Speedy Bandoulière 20 bag, shown at top, is adorned with a repurposed pattern of swirling flowers and grinning daisies. The result is a more adult version of Murakami's adolescent preoccupations.
