In a new solo exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami presents Unfamiliar People, a new series of cartoonish DayGlo portraits with crazed kaleidoscopic eyes, fangs and balloon-like heads. Completed in 2022, they symbolize how prolonged exposure to social media’s “relentless feedback loop of attention” monstrously disfigured the human ego throughout the pandemic – at least according to the wall text.
“I was deep into the cryptocurrency world when I started thinking about these paintings,” Murakami said, evidenced by a sprinkling of tiny Bitcoin, Doge and Ethereum icons. With titles like A Young Auctioneer and Twenty. A High-spirited Youth Who’s Determined to Get a Job in Finance, these newer works do express an apparent preoccupation with money.
In Unfamiliar People – Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego, on view through 12 February, the Asian Art Museum surveys three decades of Murakami’s career. Roughly half the exhibition features work made after 2020, a tumultuous year in which the artist both announced the near-bankruptcy of his production studio Kaikai Kiki and discovered the possibilities of the blockchain. In 2021 and 2022, partly inspired by Beeple’s $69m NFT sale at Christie’s, Murakami released two bodies of NFTs of his own: Clone X, a collection of spikey-haired metaverse avatars created in collaboration with the virtual collectible company RTFKT, and Murakami.Flowers, floral characters with the eight-bit, pixelated aesthetic of early Super Mario, a Japanese invention.
Murakami.Flowers was a commercial failure that tanked along with the NFT market in 2022, prompting the artist to issue an apology to his investors over social media.
Both, however, also appear in the exhibition as immaculately rendered acrylic paintings. “First and foremost, I see myself as a painter,” Murakami said during the museum press conference, only mildly lamenting that “NFTs are downhill”.
Born in Tokyo in 1962 and formally trained in the Japanese nihonga style, Murakami rose to global prominence in the early 2000s pioneering a philosophy he calls superflat.
“It lacks a perceived distinction between high and low, tying his painting back to what he sees as a longer lineage within Japanese art,” said the Unfamiliar People curator Laura Allen. Recognizing a similar flatness in both contemporary manga and 17th-century Edo-period styles and techniques, Murakami connected the dots to form a distinct aesthetic of two-dimensional maximalism that was bombastically and pristinely executed. At the entrance of the exhibition, his 2019 work Tan Tan Bo Black Hole greets visitors with the gargantuan image of an alien ghoul drooling rainbow vomit, conceived as a self-portrait during a painful case of gout. Rather than on a stretched canvas, Murakami and his small army of assistants painted the piece on to panels in the style of an 18th-century Japanese screen, and, for good measure, covered it in platinum leaf and lacquered it to a glossy sheen.
“Traditionally,” Allen said, “until the Meiji period in the 19th century, the great painters of the 17th and 18th century would design across all media.” Taking note, Murakami’s superflat philosophy also entails an interdisciplinary approach, where projects like his best-selling Louis Vuitton handbags and high-profile music videos hold the same value as his paintings. These, alongside his excessively palatable multimillion-dollar paintings of flowers, tend to draw a robust following in the realm of popular culture, but the ire of the art world.
“That’s the track that Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons had laid out for me,” he said, referring to two tremendously wealthy artists who had leveraged their art into luxury goods. “They were really working and thinking about the relationship between capitalism and art, whether they would say they were or not.”
NFTs would be the natural progression in Murakami’s multidisciplinary career; their meteoric rise in popularity presented him “a different sort of capitalism than Jeff and Damien were pursuing”. Following near-bankruptcy, which the artist attributed to both the pandemic and over-spending on an unrealized, nine-year film project, post-2020 works showcase a reinvigorated capitalist mindset: modestly scaled, relatively minimal paintings that depict NFTs and economic theorists like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes as eight-bit wallpaper – a digital aesthetic that’s decidedly uncompelling in real life.
Works before 2020, however, present Murakami as a painter of gargantuan, relentless ambition. Spanning a breadth of nearly 30 years, each work in the first half of the exhibition represents a distinct moment within the artist’s practice: his ghoulish mutations of religious figures following Fukushima, for example, or his tranquil reinterpretations of Yuan dynasty porcelain vases in 2019. The latest is Judgement Day, 2023, a monumental, 25-meter-long piece begun after the Unfamiliar People paintings (and according to the painter, it’s not fully complete) that marks a return to form: built on ukiyo-e motifs of kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers and crashing waves, every inch explodes with a full spectrum of marbled colors and figures in action.
“Maybe I’m done releasing NFTs,” Murakami said, but he maintains hope that with time, they’ll prove to be an artistic movement beyond anything since pop art. “It’s an artist’s job and vocation to present fresh ideas,” he added. “Expanding NFTs into fine art is what I’m fully pursuing right now.”
