- Venue
- Gagosian Gallery
- Location
- London
The male sexual complex becomes microscopically investigated, artistically dissected and sociologically exploded to the audience in Takashi Murakami’s latest exhibition of Superflat work, as he depicts historically charged, pop-anime paintings and sculptures that make differences between the flat picture plane and third-dimension in terms of their impact on or within Japanese society and cultures, namely the subculture of otaku.
The exhibition marks a (hopefully) temporary farewell to his international ambassador, Mr DOB, an anime character of his own imagination who since 1996 has represented his Superflat theory as an exploration into Japan’s ever increasing cultural descent into its population’s darkly obsession with anime and capitalism. The character, over the years, had evolved from a culturally appropriated mickey mouse into a monstrous study of otaku’s beastly followers and old Japan’s loss of its ancestral iconography. However, another noticeable absence are Murakami’s trademarked ‘mushroom’ characters, which represented postcolonial discourse as symbols of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two products of American capitalist and imperialist invention.
The latest group of paintings and sculptures are in keeping with Superflat as critiques of Japan’s growing dependency and need for inspiration from capitalist products, thus demonstrated in Murakami’s wide-ranging aesthetic field. With Mr DOB and the ‘mushrooms’ on temporary leave from their careers as illustrative examples of Japanese postcolonial history and Western imperialism, the hallucinogenic Pop colours that have come to be associated with Murakami’s refined contemporary painting technique. Rather in this segment of his practice, Murakami has reinvented religious iconography and materialised narratives of otherworldliness and illumination. This has positioned him as a bold and lively individual where he is his own character in-tune with the past and present as his times.
The paintings Wisdom, Impression Sentimental (2011) pay tribute to Kuroda Seiki’s works of the same name, which are featured alongside their three modernised counterparts as a means of reclaiming a new restatement of tradition against the contemporaryily product friendly. The original Kuroda’s were essentially controversial due to their content and they are matched by Murakami’s two nearby sculptures Nurse Ko2 (2011) and 3-Meter Girl (2011) which contribute an extra dimension to his Superflat pieces rather like Miss Ko (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) which were often pitted against the sensational paintings Milk (1998) and Cream (1998). Meanwhile the paintings Shunga: Gibbons (2010) and Shunga: Bow Wow (2010) are more historical, as explicit erotic Edo Period updates that re-introduce a ‘pornotopia’, depicting a sexual equality that is also seen in the sculptures Mr Big Mushroom (2011) and Miss Clam (2011) until others like Miss Ko2 (1997) revert the current dimension backwards as a smaller sister to Miss Ko.
The sculpture 3-Meter Girl pushes the boundaries between traditional Western figure sculpture like Michelangelo’s David (1504) and toy manga mini-sculptures that parade Japanese retail shops, as it exploits its subject without the need for nudity as her comically engorged breasts and petite body struggle to support her against possible ‘threats’ to her physical, emotional or spiritual character.
Most of the works seem to conflict themselves as Nurse Ko2 becomes “as much nightmare as fantasy”* with her pious yet sexually suggestive still-frame figure (Ko which stands for Knock Out, a videogame and sporting term) or Mr Big and Miss Clam that, like Oval Buddha (2007) are torn between the dark recesses of spirituality and material possession. The exhibition offers less child-friendly work than others but is the next stop to Pop: sexual erotica.
* Ben Luke in Evening Standard, Tuesday 28 June 2011
