Takashi
Murakami

Murakami’s first solo show was at Tokyo’s Ginza Surugadai Gallery in 1989, around the same time that he began travelling to and from New York after finishing his Nihonga studies. His rise to success came in line with the Nipponese Neo-pop movement and Japan’s economic crisis of the late 1980s, both of which can be seen reflected in both the ‘pop’ elements and materialist focus of his works.

Mr. DOB emerged at this point in his career, first as a DNA helix in ZaZaZaZaZaZa (1994), before going through a series of evolutions until he became a monstrous symbol of society’s addiction to consumerist culture in Tan Tan Bo Vomiting (2002).

Throughout the late 90s, Murakami worked in his self-made POKU style (a portmanteau of ‘pop’ and ‘otaku’), and works such as Miss Ko2 (1997) and Hiropon (1997) emerged. These pieces are examples of how his work began to deal with more explicit content in conjunction with commercial pop culture themes.

Murakami’s influences are myriad. It was Bob Flanagan’s work at the New Museum in 1994, illustrating the needle fetish that had resulted from a lifetime of necessary medical injections, that taught Murakami that art was about much more than conventional beauty. It was Katsuhiro Otomo (who wrote Domu: A Child’s Dream (1980-1981)), animator Yoshinori Kanada, animation director Hayao Miyazaki, and George Lucas, who influenced his own bold, cartoonish style.

Other influences come from the likes of Horst Janssen’s drawings, Buddhist iconography, Zen painting, and 18th century Edo composition techniques. Murakami cites every exhibition he visited in SoHo when he first began exploring New York as an influence because of how cutting-edge the art was in comparison to what he had been exposed to in Japan.