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.
