Takashi Murakami Versus Himself

Murakami's caricature of himself vomiting with happy flowers behind him

Last week my colleagues and I had a chance to see the latest Takashi Murakami show being held at Tai Kwun Contemporary that runs until September 1 minus the hordes of crowds. I saw his show last year at the Vancouver Art Gallery called The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, and none of the pieces in there were in this exhibition in Hong Kong.

Entitled Murakami vs Murakami, this show gives another side of the artist that are on a more personal level, as well as site-specific pieces, sculptures, animation, costumes and even carpet! Visitors had to wear shoe covers in order to tour the exhibition as there are two rooms covered with Murakami carpet!

The curious The Birth of a Universe sculpture in gold

We were advised to go to the third floor then walk down and the first room had carpet covered in colourful skulls. In the middle of the large room is a giant gold leaf sculpture called The Birth Cry of a Universe after Murakami worked on it for 10 years.

It's several layers of creatures with nasty spiky teeth, collapsing on top of each other. Why one would make it in gold... is it meant to be ironic? Bling bling? Grotesque yet grand? We don't quite know what to make of it.

The next room is filled with mannequins all looking uniform in orange jumpsuits, and there are pieces from Murakami's own personal art collection. There are photographs of Larry Gagosian, prints of illustrations by Andy Warhol, some strange pieces of sushi that have images of women on them...

After walking down the spiral staircase we were immediately taken by the several costumes the Japanese artist designed -- with him as the mannequin in white complete with glasses, white beard and white hair. He is making fun of himself wearing them in various poses and they're hilarious.

Murakami being eaten by Mr DOB

He's dressed in a giant ball covered in his famous smiling flowers and he's even wearing a sunflower headdress complete with green leggings and even sneakers covered in his signature sunflowers. In another one he has a hot pink octopus on his head and a colourful suit with octopus arms on the blazer. Maybe Murakami should design his own line of clothing...

Even better he is being eaten by one his own creatures Mr DOB, actually Murakami's alter ego, or wearing what looks like a massive kimono but really it's a humungous polo shirt of his happy flowers, funky pants and giant slippers. His creativity really knows no bounds.

Another room features the superflat flowers. Murakami's theory of superflat refers to not only the perspectival flatness on the picture plane in Japanese art, but also the rejection of hierarchical divisions between high and low art, and of society itself.

This room is also covered in carpet featuring every possible shade of his flowers from red, green, blue and yellow that are all coded with numbers... it's really nerdy! There are giant sunflower cushions to sit on and watch a Murakami animation that is so absurd I burst out laughing when a creature that was terrorizing a city spewed out a giant piece of turd... thank goodness we couldn't smell it!

Cute (but expensive) flower cushions on the flower carpet

I also love the way Murakami is very willing to make fun of himself and the way he looks. There's a caricature of him vomiting some colourful stuff from his mouth, his eyes looking glazed. The walls were covered in the flower wallpaper and one of my colleagues thinks superfan Murakami collectors probably have the same wallpaper on their walls... how crazy is that?

The final room is a serene departure from the previous one, though it's completely covered in gold. In a way it harks back to Warhol's Silver Factory, but up several notches with the wow factor. There's a giant gold sculpture called Flower Parent and Child, a caricature of Murakami raising his right hand in salute with his dog Pom, the first creature with whom he could really express his love -- even though he is married...

Murakami vs Murakami is such a curious exhibition that reveals so many facets of the artist and his evolution of work. His mind must be going non-stop with so many ideas that he has to have a giant team of people to execute them all -- brilliantly too.

A gold sculpture of Murakami and dog Pom

He and Jeff Koons are the two artists who don't physically have a hand in every single piece of work they produce, and yet they claim them as their own. However it's no different from artists from other periods in history who relied on apprentices to help them too.

Nevertheless the size, scale and various mediums Murakami produces is staggering and doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon.

Murakami vs Murakami
June 1-September 1, 2019
Tai Kwun Contemporary
10 Hollywood Road
Central
www.taikwun.hk
Tai Kwun Contemporary

Takashi Murakami's Superflat Art

There are 55 works shown, many featuring Mr. DOB, the mouse character

Takashi Murakami is a famous Japanese artist who is known for his commercial work -- collaborations with Louis Vuitton, an album cover for rapper Kanye West (in 2007) and music producer Pharell Williams.

Early on, Murakami explored the theme of the atomic bomb

But at the same time Murakami's work is exhibited in museums and sold at auctions. His show, Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, closes tomorrow at the Vancouver Art Gallery and my friend and I had a chance to catch it a few days ago.

It's a major retrospective that spans three decades of his career, featuring more than 55 works. It turns out that Murakami has a PhD in Nihonga, a traditional style of Japanese painting, but he wanted to explore the boundary between fine art and commercial art, like anime, a concept he calls Superflat. To Murakami, superflat is as if a metaphorical atomic bomb has flattened high art and low culture.

Murakami's Mr. DOB character again in abstract forms

He created an anime character called Mr. DOB that kind of looks like Mickey Mouse, but in some cases you can see bits of Murakami in it. He uses Mr. DOB in various ways and it becomes more and more abstract and bizarre. His works featuring the character look like anime happening simultaneously with various references.

I love his flowers -- they are daisies with smiling faces -- what's not to like about them? These flowers while they are his earlier works, can be seen in later ones with Mr. DOB or they pop up in other pieces as if to add some comic relief.

However not all his art is frivolous. When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, Murakami was profoundly affected by it and sought to process the shock and sadness through his art. He created works featuring ahrats, or Buddhists who have advanced on the path of Enlightenment but have not yet reached Nirvana.

100 Ahrats, Muramaki's response to the 2011 tsunami

He has created a piece featuring 100 Ahrats, each one different from the other, old men with scraggly faces, looking learned or have suffered profoundly for their beliefs. The piece seems dark, but at the same time there is a colourful background, perhaps showing the contrast of life and death.

The process of how Murakami creates his works is also fascinating. He starts off with his original sketch of what he wants to do. This is scanned into the computer and refined. Once the composition is approved, it is then blown up to a huge size, into several panels and teams making up over 100 people start working on them.

Using a kind of silkscreening process, the bright colours are placed layers on top of layers and then some parts of gone over again manually with a paint and brush, others decorated with gold leaf. Murakami has a giant catalog of silk screens with patterns that are used over and over again, which is what helps him create works in a kind of mechanical way.

One cannot help but smile at Flowers Flowers Flowers

He inspects each piece before he deems them finished, and this can be a painstaking process as the designs need to perfectly connect together, let alone the silkscreening process. If you see enough of his works you will see repetition of textures and designs.

Perhaps what makes Murakami legitimate is his having studied a PhD in traditional art, and then periodically referring to the past, some pieces harking back to antique lacquer works, yet his flower designs are there, or a cartoon-like lion that is a reminder of a centuries' old Japanese lion as if to give him legitimacy in the art world.

However, he doesn't seem to regard art as "low art" or "high art" -- they are all art to Murakami.

Another interesting aspect was that two large pieces weren't completed on time for the Vancouver show -- they are called TBC and if you first look at them, they seem finished, but if you look closer, there are outlines of characters that have yet to be filled in. Murakami writes a note to visitors of the show, apologizing that he didn't have enough time to finish them. He knows this doesn't absolve him of not meeting the deadline, but at the same time do his fans really care?

Kanye Bear, inspired by Kanye West

The show is strangely called The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg because in extreme circumstances, an octopus will eat its own leg for survival, but at the same time it does this knowing the leg will grow back. So Murakami sees himself as an octopus, growing and evolving his art.

At the same time he's a smart businessman -- he has a company called Kaikai Kiki that churns out Murakami products from stickers to plastic folders, prints of his works and even giant flower cushions. We were shocked at how expensive they were -- the large round flower cushions were CAD$395 each! With the exhibition closing, the gift shop was hoping fans would sweep up the merchandise at 50 percent off, but even that didn't entice many big purchases. We might have bought some of they were in HK dollars, not Canadian dollars...

However, at least two of his series of prints were sold out, one priced around CAD$1,200, the other at over CAD$5,000.

Murakami must have been a blockbuster show for the VAG and good on it for snagging such a top popular artist. So many young people came to check out the exhibition and it also gives everyone a better understanding of where the artist is coming from. I certainly learned a lot!

Murakami combines old and new, life and death

The show next goes to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg

February 3-May 6, 2018

Vancouver Art Gallery

Picture of the Day: Emily Carr

Abstract Tree Forms is on show at the Vancouver Art Gallery now

The Vancouver Art Gallery has one of the best collections of BC artist Emily Carr's work. The museum's latest exhibition is called "Emily Carr: Into the Forest" focuses on one of her favourite topics, trees.

It also gives the VAG an opportunity to showcase Carr's work in a thematic way and showing her progression from a realist painter to more abstract.

One of the paintings I really liked was this one, called Abstract Tree Forms that was painted from 1931-32.

And in this case the tree has been pared down to sensual, curvaceous forms, and connecting one tree to the rest of the forest like undulating waves -- a sea of trees.

Nearby where this painting was hung was a timeline of Carr's life and it was interesting to note that in 1930, she had solo exhibitions in Ottawa, Victoria and Seattle. In the same year she also went to Toronto and New York, where she met American artist Georgia O'Keefe.

After that Carr paints this painting.

One can see clearly that in Abstract Tree Forms that O'Keefe's influence rubbed off on Carr.

We can only imagine the conversations they had! To be a fly on the wall back then! Both women were very independent, determined, stubborn, and they also had a mutual love for nature around them.

Emily Carr: Into the Forest

Until December 3, 2017

Vancouver Art Gallery

750 Hornby Street

Vancouver

www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

Claude Monet's Impressionism

Monet was fascinated by reflections found in his pond at Giverny

This morning I headed to the Vancouver Art Gallery to check out Claude Monet: Secret Garden that just kicked off late last month and is on until October 1.

Another painting of the waterlilies

Luckily I had a free ticket and got to literally walk in -- there was a pretty long line at the entrance to buy admission tickets.

This exhibition features 38 paintings from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris. The museum has the biggest collection of Monet's works in the world, as well as other Impressionist painters like Edgar Degas, Camille Pissaro, Paul Gaugin and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The museum is currently undergoing renovation, which is why Monet's works are touring around -- with Vancouver as the only North American city stop.

In the show, the paintings focus on his impressionist style and in particular when he lived in Giverny, France, where he lived from 1883 until his death in 1926. We see his enthusiasm for painting in situ as much as possible, to capture the moment, and how he would paint the same subject over and over, studying how the light affects it at different times of the day and seasons.

He once said that he never used the colour black because nature didn't use it, and instead used other colour combinations to paint shadows.

My picture of the pond in 2015, with the bridge at the back

You also see the progression of his work, from the beginning of his impressionist style that becomes more abstract as he gets older, mostly because his eyesight was deteriorating and the frustration of not being able to see the colours as well almost put him off painting.

However, Monet could not not paint -- as a result his colours become more bold and farther from reality, moving away from pastel colours to more burgundies, browns, oranges, and ochre.

This progression was illustrated in his series of paintings of the Japanese bridge at Giverny. In reality the bridge is a pistachio green, with a canopy of wisteria hanging overhead, as well as some weeping willows.

However, in his later years, the colours change and become a more autumnal palette, the brushstrokes aren't very definitive in terms of identifiable shapes, but still strong and determined.

This painting of the bridge was done in 1918-19...

He and his two sons moved to Giverny, a country home he rented with his patron's widow, Alice Hoschede and her six children. They later married. When they moved to Giverny, he set about designing the gardens, and showed his green thumb expertise and enthusiasm.

There he planted many different kinds of flowers and made a pond where he could set up his Japanese-style bridge. It was the reflections in the water that fascinated the artist, inspiring him to paint his most well-known works, the waterlilies.

"These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel," Monet remarked in 1908.

At the end of the show, there is a small room, where American photographer Stephen Shore took pictures of Giverny, giving visitors a better idea of what the gardens looked like in reality.

... while this one was done 1918 to 1924 that is more abstract

I had the privilege of being at Giverny just over two years ago, and I loved every moment being there, knowing that Monet had wandered the same grounds and we saw the same flowers he planted in the late 19th century.

It is interesting to speculate what kinds of paintings Monet would have produced if his eyesight wasn't so bad -- what would he have done?

After his death in 1926, he did not have a will, but all his possessions were inherited by his younger son Michel. When he died in 1966, he bequeathed what he had to Musee Marmottan Monet.

We are very lucky to see this show and be up close to Monet, who taught us to see things in another way.

Claude Monet: Secret Garden

Until October 1, 2017

Vancouver Art Gallery

750 Hornby Street

Vancouver

www.vanartgallery.bc.ca