The Japanese superstar artist and entrepreneur Takashi Murakami has long presumed to do battle with the monstrosities of consumer culture in his pop-art paintings and sculptures.
He has also developed himself and his work into a major brand. He even has a logo: a hybrid sunflower smiley face, which regularly appears in nearly all his artworks.
Murakami, the founder of Kaikai Kiki, a Tokyo-based gallery and production house akin to Andy Warhol’s “factory,” has partnered with a slew of luxury brands throughout his career, including Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garçons, as well as musicians such as Billie Eilish and Kanye West.
Murakami’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco, “Unfamiliar People — Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego,” now on view at the Asian Art Museum through Feb. 12, includes a range of work from 1996 to the present.
Murakami proposes the paintings and sculptures, mostly of cartoonish monsters, to be commentaries on consumerism and social media personas. But the question lingers: Can an artist critique something he so thoroughly represents?
For the most part, Murakmi’s artworks are executed with a team of assistants in his signature “superflat” technique — an intensive process of screen-printing digital illustrations onto canvases in 20-plus layers of acrylic paint, sanding down those layers to achieve a burnished effect and repeating, until finally covering the painting in a clear coat of varnish.
The result is a smooth surface resembling a vinyl decal, making it hard to believe that a human hand was ever involved.
“Monsterized” provides a view into how his style has evolved. The earliest work in the show, “722,” showing a cutesy, circular smiley face, sporting a row of razor-sharp teeth and floating on
a cloud — an art-
historical reference to traditional Japanese illustrated handscrolls — is one of the few instances where you can actually see the paint strokes.
Two recent paintings in the exhibition, “Qinghua: Grass Carp, Chinese Perch, Lotus Flowers” and “Qinghua: Black Carp, Carassius, and Lotus Flowers” are a return to this more painterly form.
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Based on designs from the Asian Art Museum’s own collection of antique ceramics — of which Murakami is an avid collector — the large canvases feature fish and flowers, with whorls and drips of blue and gold paint. The return to these painterly techniques feels welcome amidst so many plastic pictures.
The exhibition’s centerpiece is “Judgement Day,” a 25-panel painting nearly 10 feet by 100 feet. Here, Murakami riffs on the style and themes of Ukiyo-e — a genre of Japanese art popularly known for woodblock prints — kabuki and sumo, in a maximalist frenzy of colors and characters. The king of hell sits at the center, flanked by tangled knots of human bodies, ships rocking on rainbow waves, geisha and samurai. The piece is staggering in scope and scale, a mid-career masterpiece in the ultimate execution of his stylistic development.
It’s also unfinished. Since the final layer of clear varnish hasn’t been applied, “Judgement Day” offers the rare opportunity to see the work of a perfectionist like Murakami still in process, and this glimpse under the hood feels like the most illuminating element of the whole show.
Even when they’re visually minimal, Murakami’s themes continue to be meditations on excess, some more successful than others.
His series of non-fungible tokens, “Murakami.Flowers,” which he launched in 2021, featured more than 11,000 pixelated variations on his smiley-face flowers. For “Monsterized,” he has re-painted more than 100 of these illustrations onto small, square canvases.
There might be something interesting about returning digital art to the physical world — if NFTs weren’t trying to recreate physicality in the first place — but the exercise feels redundant and proves that, stripped of controversy and the allure of fast cash, NFTs fall flat.
The monotonously smiling flowers also serve as the wallpaper pattern for what can only be described as a selfie stage: a small room with a floor-to-ceiling window offering plenty of natural light for visitors to pose against the quintessentially Murakami-brand backdrop. If the artist believes social media to be an ego inflator, he’s merrily priming the pump.
Murakami’s sampling of other forms of culture — from woodblocks to selfies — feels like the artist’s concession that there’s nothing new under the sun as well as a proposal that the highest form of art is rebranding something as your own. It could be a compelling position or a capitalist contradiction.
Perhaps that unsettling paradox is Murakami’s point. Either way, it’s frightening.