Writing: More About the Father of Superflat

Last spring, during New York City’s Sakura Matsuri, I visited the Museum of Modern Art with my friend, Melinda. A devoted art student, she wanted to introduce me to Murakami Takashi. Since her first visit, the Louis Vuitton logos and bright colors had begun showing themselves in her work. From a technical perspective, Murakami is amazing – his paintings are not only filled with detail but literally “super flat” with no visible brush stroke. Unless your face is a millimeter from the canvas, you can easily mistake it for a computer print-out.

I feel now, since reading the article, “Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan,” that there is more to Murakami’s work than I first gleaned. At the exhibit, I entered a room with floor to ceiling with smiling flowers. The faces, all just a little different, filled me with unease. I cannot describe it in any other way - his work has no dimension, but it still drips, overwhelms. However, I never realized that the Superflat movement was so connected to history, that it was a brightly-colored apocalypse, fueled by computers and how they store memory in numbers.

Nevertheless, because the article focuses on Superflat, it misses an entire spectrum of Murakami’s work: sculpture. The first piece I saw was a larger-than-life, fiberglass, anime, girl - vagina exposed - transforming into a rainbow-colored airplane. Later, there is a naked boy with Dragonball Z hair making a cloud-like lasso from his ejaculate. Across the room, a girl with teal pigtails plays jump rope with the milk that exudes from her nipples. Murakami’s work speaks wonders to the sexual aspects of Japanese animation, another topic we have discussed in class. I feel he is ridiculing the sexual nature of anime by making it so blatant and using cartoon conventions. By not covering this, I feel Thomas Looser misses an entire commentary on popular culture.

More on Murakami: http://www.takashimurakami.com/