Takashi Murakami

In the 2004 exhibition Seeing Other People at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, each gallery artist selected an additional artist to show alongside their own work. Takashi Murakami chose Andy Warhol, and a 1986 silkscreen on canvas entitled Camouflage.

Animals use camouflage as a natural part of both their defensive and attacking strategies. In 1915, the French army first introduced camouflage on the Western Front. Professional artists were asked to suggest how judiciously applied colour could be used to break up the shape of military objects so as to confuse and confound.

A strong influence on the French camouflageurs was the work of the Cubist painters, who used the slow graduation from light to dark colours to break up and flatten out the shape of an object.

Zoologists became involved with what was perhaps the most prominent camouflage exercise of the Great War: the dazzle-painting of both warships and merchant vessels, whereby the whole of the ship above the waterline was painted with angular patterns, or curved lines, in primary colours. Over the course of the war over 4,000 merchant ships and naval escorts were so painted.

The dazzle-painting deployed by Takashi Murakami is often called Superflat. He trained for nine years in the traditional nineteenth-century Japanese technique of Nihon-ga painting, where the emphasis is on surface with no perspective. His paintings are produced along with sculptures, prints, products and animations by teams of artists in factory-like studios in Brooklyn and Tokyo, the HQs of his Kaikai Kiki Corporation.

Murakami plays with the oppositions in Eastern and Western culture. He sees no difference between high art and popular culture. He has borrowed from the pleasures of theme parks and Japanese otaku (geek) culture, and has given the world his trademarked character, Mr DOB, a mutant Mickey Mouse.

Like Andy Warhol, he has been accused of being too commercial. His ongoing collaboration with French label Louis Vuitton has seen new life breathed into their range of handbags and leather goods, and many millions into the cash tills. It is said that some modern soldiers do not feel they are real soldiers unless they are wearing camouflage uniforms and most armies now have their own particular camouflage pattern. The original LV logo was a product of nineteenth-century French Japonisme. The dazzling reimagining in the candy colours of twenty-first-century Japanese Anime became the fashion must-have for armies of fashionistas ‘Genuine’ imitations of this cutest of camouflage still work wonders on eBay. Takashi Murakami, forever Mouseketeer, Marketeer and Musketeer. All for one, one for all.

Jellyfish Eyes- Max & Shimon, 2004
Installation
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2004
Exhibited at Canning Place

Jellyfish Eyes- Saki, 2004
Installation
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2004
Exhibited at Canning Place

Jellyfish Eyes- Tatsuya, 2004
Installation
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2004
Exhibited at Canning Place

Untitled, 2004
Billboard, 96 sheets
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2004
Exhibited at Canning Place

SUPPORTED BY

The Japan Foundation