THE MAVERICK MINDSET

With the opening of his new exhibition in Japan, Takashi Murakami speaks to Tatler about his prolific and wide-ranging career

- Aaina Bhargava

Takashi Murakami's smiling flowers are instantly recognisable; few living artists have emblems as iconic as his and even fewer have become cultural icons in their lifetimes. While multiple interpretations of the flowers exist, the Japanese artist has explained that their meanings are layered. The most prominent explanation is that they resemble hope amid forlorn circumstances; but Murakami conceived his blooms, and much of his work, while thinking about the collective trauma of the Japanese after the Second World War, with particular regard to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The discomfiting feeling evoked by the flower motif is the result of anxiety suppressed under a seemingly cheery surface, emitting a universally resonant existential angst.

Life, death and mortality have been constants throughout Murakami's prolific career. His new exhibition, Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto, on view at the Higashiyama Cube at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art on the occasion of the institution's 90th anniversary, and running until September 1, dwells on these themes, as well as on Kyoto itself, where he relocated his family in 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami.

He spoke to Tatler just ahead of the February 3 opening of Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto, saying that while all his exhibitions are unique, "the current Kyoto show is especially emotional and special, as it might be my final exhibition in Japan in my lifetime". Featuring more than 170 artworks-the majority of which are new creations-the exhibition is the artist's first to be held in Japan in eight years, and the first outside of Tokyo.