Artist, Misunderstood

A failed cartoonist who became the world’s most pervasive originator — but why is Takashi Murakami not more celebrated asks CHRISTINA KO.

THE REASONS MURAKAMI is not considered a “serious artist” are many: The ubiquity of his work, his willingness to collaborate with commercial brands, his unabashed obsession with otaku and anime culture, his conscious courting of what the art world considers low-brow or cutesy culture. Hype beasts may love him; The art world turns its nose up.

“For the high-brow Western community, he’s a guy who’s making funny pictures,” explains Katya Inozemtseva, curator of Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which is putting on a Murakami exhibition this month. “Very flat and very colourful. And they don’t really know or they don’t want to know or explore more.”

Yet, according to Murakami himself, he’s even less rated in his homeland. “I’m Japanese, I cannot escape where I’m from,” Murakami tells me. “But reaction [to my work] is also big in the US and Europe, the mainland and Hong Kong. In Japan, nothing has a reaction. I don’t know, I mention myself that I am a Japanese artist, but when I go home, nobody mentions that.”

He echoes what Mori Art Museum director Fumio Nanjo, who staged a Murakami exhibition in 2015, told Prestige in an interview: “He criticised people. And he’s always talking about his strategy — but people in Japan have an image that an artist should not be like this, he should be like Van Gogh, just making art. It’s a purer idea. So people didn’t really think he was that important before. But his work is really high-quality. Now we realise that, because of interest outside of Japan, his work is so expensive it’s impossible to buy. Actually there are not many works in Japan in museums.”