Murakami

Takashi Murakami (村上 隆 Murakami Takashi?, born in Tokyo), is a prolific contemporary Japanese artist who works in both fine arts media, such as painting, as well as digital and commercial media. He blurs the boundaries between high and low art. He appropriates popular themes from mass media and pop culture, then turns them into thirty-foot sculptures, "Superflat" paintings, or marketablecommercial goods such as figurines or phone caddies.

Takashi Murakami (隆 Takashi Murakami ? , nacido en Tokio ), es un prolífico contemporánea artista japonés que trabaja tanto en las bellas artes los medios de comunicación, como la pintura, así como digitales comerciales y los medios de comunicación. Se desdibuja los límites entre alta y baja de arte . Se apropia de temas populares de los medios decomunicación y la cultura pop, a continuación, los convierte en esculturas de treinta pies, " Superflat "pinturas o productos comerciales negociables tales como figurillas o bases de soporte del teléfono.

Life and career
Takashi Murakami attended the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, initially studying more traditional Japanese art. He pursued a doctorate in Nihonga, atraditional style of Japanese painting. However, due to the popularity of anime and manga, Japanese styles of animation and comic graphic stories, Murakami became disillusioned with Nihonga. He became passionate about otaku culture, which he felt was more representative of modern-day Japanese life.
This resulted in Superflat, the style that Murakami is credited with starting. It developed from Poku, (Pop +otaku). Murakami has written that he aims to represent Poku culture because he expects that animation and otaku might create a new culture. This new culture is a rejuvenation of the contemporary Japanese art scene. In interviews, Murakami has expressed a frustration with the lack of a reliable and sustainable art market in post-war Japan, and the general view of Japanese art as having a low artstatus. He is quoted as saying that the market is nothing but "a shallow appropriation of Western trends". His first reaction was to make art in non-fine arts media. Then he decided to focus on the market sustainability of art and promote himself first overseas. This marks the birth of KaiKai Kiki, LLC.
In 2008, Takashi Murakami made Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" list, the onlyvisual artist included.[1]
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Artwork

"Army of Mushrooms", Frank Cohen Collection, Manchester
Murakami's style, called Superflat, is characterized by flat planes of color and graphic images involving a character style derived from anime and manga. Superflat is an artistic style that comments on otaku lifestyle and subculture, as well as consumerism and sexual fetishism.
Like Andy Warhol,Takashi Murakami takes low culture and repackages it, and sells it to the highest bidder in the "high-art" market. Also like Warhol, Murakami makes his repacked low culture available to all other markets in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, T-shirts, key chains, mouse pads, plush dolls, cell phone caddies, and $5,000 limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags. This is comparable to ClaesOldenburg, who sold his own low art, high art pieces in his own store front in the 1960s. What makes Murakami different is his methods of production, and his work is not in one store front but many, ranging from toy stores, candy aisles, comic book stores, and the French design house of Louis Vuitton. Murakami's style is an amalgam of his Western predecessors, Warhol, Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, aswell as Japanese predecessors and contemporaries of anime and manga. He has successfully marketed himself to Western culture and to Japan in the form of Kaikai Kiki and GEISAI.
Interviewer Magdalene Perez asked him about straddling the line between art and commercial products, and mixing art with branding and merchandizing. Murakami said,
"I don’t think of it as straddling. I think of it as...