The phenomenon of Takashi Murakami – global brand recognition, relentless market complicity – is so synonymous with money that it is hard to look at his new show without seeing merchandise before all else. There is a vigilant bodyguard for every two paintings at Gagosian. Enormous, gleaming, teeming “interpretations” of Japanese art, via his trademark combination of eye-popping colours, plus cartoonish figures adapted out of anime and manga, they are among Murakami’s biggest works yet. But what does that title actually mean: what is Murakami making of the history of Japanese art?
His own place in Japanese culture is famous and fixed. He was born in Tokyo in 1962 and his work has literally spawned its own movement, known as Superflat, after the name he coined in 2000. It takes the distinctive “flatness” of Japanese art and forces it hard towards design, deleting perspective, condensing elements of style, addinghis logos of boggling eyes, shiny skulls and smiley sunflowers.
In 2002, invited to collaborate with Louis Vuitton, he wove his logos into the luxury brand’s designs for leather goods. (This line continues even now.) And the trade went both ways when Murakami began to incorporate the LV monogram into his paintings. This was long before Yayoi Kusama sold her spots to the company, or Damien Hirst turned out butterfly scarves for Alexander McQueen. Murakami has also collaborated with Issey Miyake, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Billie Eilish, with whom he co-created an animated video for one of her tracks in 2019.
For the art world, of course, the perception has to be different. Murakami has been praised for fusing ancient art with modern politics, for his anti-nuclear and post-pandemic ruminations, for the “complexity” of his corporatism and high-low art. He gives excellent interviews, often dispensing unbeatable definitions of his speciality – “cuteness and catastrophe”. But this show, his biggest in Britain for 15 years, is art about art. The emphasis is very purely on what these images look like.
They come in all sizes, fit for the atrium, museum, boardroom or boudoir. Their surfaces are smooth, lacquer-shiny and prophylactically sealed against damage, touch or time. They have the oleaginous glint of the very materials from which they are made: acrylic, gold leaf and glitter. At a distance, many of them look like blingy reprises of traditional Japanese watercolours, woodblocks and scrolls. Up close, they look as if put through a computer program to come out brighter, coarser and (paradoxically) cheaper.
Sometimes, the variations feel minimal in effect. There are fetching images of chrysanthemums, a river winding away into the distance behind them, against gold leaf. The river is an entirely stylised abstraction, and the “Murakamisation”, as people call it, simply consists of inserting smiley faces into the centre of each flower. His version of Ogata Kōrin’s 17th-century peacocks screen – a national treasure in Japan – Murakamises the eyes in the male peacock’s feathers, but to what end? The gallery guide urges us to think of the “refinement of aristocratic culture”, yet what you see is the opposite of refinement.
He can be humorous. A manga figure scoots along on a Zen cloud of shiny white acrylic. Air rises in embossed gold spirals, like super-expensive wallpaper. He does massive mythological dragons breathing multicoloured whorls that may make you think of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night; a fizzing reminder of the Dutchman’s debt to Japanese art.
But the bigger the composition, the more Where’s Wally? Murakami gets. Among scenes of water-gathering, cherry blossom viewing, warfare, dancing and courtly love, he will plant one of his dopey Mr Dob figures, such as a bug-eyed Mickey Mouse – for no good reason, or so it seems, than the teasing treasure hunt to find it. All of the several hundred little figures arranged across a massive landscape of water and a tree-fringed mountain have scarlet or cobalt eyes, for no obvious reason than modern chemical colours, and each delicate figure is rendered as crudely as if stamped out by some quickfire machine.
Murakami has taken over Gagosian’s premises near the Royal Academy too, and turned the place into a shop: multicoloured smiley flower paintings upstairs, affordable prints downstairs. He is the Hello Kitty of Japanese art. Yet we are to think of the main show as having gravitas, to see him as pondering “the erosion of the nation’s ancient splendour” and the way it has been altered by new aesthetics. In this feedback loop, the erosion and alteration are not just reflected in, but somewhat exacerbated by, his own work.
Yet Murakami’s dragons and mythical critters are amiable to the point of pretty. His geisha has enormous manga eyes. His owl is curiously whimsical. Far from the pointed politics, or the vaunted antagonisms of his art, or even the supposed insights into art history, Murakami’s main shtick in this show is more cuteness than catastrophe. The real surprise is just how mild and anodyne these works really are.
• Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami is at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, until 8 March
