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murakami
The Murakami Influence
As a curious crowd gathered at the entrance to
Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, a team of riggers,
steelworkers and Japanese art world figures went into action. Slowly, step
by step, a crane operator started moving a pair of psychedelic-yellow
fiberglass elephants into place.
  Librado
Romero/The New York Times
Fiberglass sculptures by the artist Chinatsu Ban are installed at
Fifth Avenue and 60th Street
When the mother and baby pachyderms came to rest on their lime green
steel bases, their trunks beckoning toward a statue of William Tecumseh
Sherman just across the way at the Plaza Hotel, an inconspicuous woman in a
purple knit hat, ripped blue jeans and woolly brown jacket began proudly
posing in front of the sculptures. She was Chinatsu Ban, 31, the creator of
the public art sculpture, which is graced by a pile of pink, green and
purple dung decorated with hearts.
But the star presence was her mentor, the contemporary artist Takashi
Murakami, whose studio of a dozen or so artists are showing their artwork
around Manhattan this week.
"There's a cute culture in Japan that everyone knows about,"
Mr. Murakami said of his art. "But without digging deeper, it's hard to
understand. It's like Pop Art - if you can't understand the consumer culture
in America, you can't understand it."
The public art displays by Mr. Murakami's associates were organized in
tandem with "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding
Subculture," a show organized by the artist that opens to the public on
Friday at the Japan Society. ("Little Boy" is a reference to the
code name used by the United States military for the atomic bomb unleashed
on Hiroshima in 1945.)
The artist Chiho Aoshima has designed a vinyl wallpaper that will cover
the Union Square subway station in May. Other examples of work by Mr.
Murakami and his stable can be found on subway posters, wrapped around the
exterior of Japan Society on East 47th Street, and even in the windows of
Louis Vuitton's Fifth Avenue store, which are filled with cherry-decorated
handbags designed by the master.
"V W X Yellow Elephant Underwear/H I J Kiddy Elephant
Underwear," the installation at Doris C. Freedman Plaza at Central
Park, was installed in collaboration with the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit
organization that presents art around the city.
Both the mother elephant - 9 feet tall, 12 feet wide and weighing about a
half ton - and the baby - 3 feet, 2½ feet wide and 200 pounds - have wide
eyes, long eyelashes, large bodies and no mouths. Even more whimsical are
their outfits: each is wearing multicolored underpants decorated with
stripes, polka dots and hearts.
"I wanted the elephants to look as though they had just walked out
of F. A. O. Schwarz," said Tom Eccles, director of the Public Art Fund.
(F. A. O. Schwarz is across the way at 58th Street.) "They're meant to
create a gateway to the park, like the lions at the Public Library. They're
very contemporary but almost 19th century in their placement, something that
is both familiar and uncanny."
Ms. Ban, the artist, speaking through an interpreter, said she had chosen
the elephant as a subject for her sculptures because as a child she bought a
small elephant figurine that over the years became her symbol of comfort and
safety. The underpants, she said, are a symbol of protection.
While the elephants might reflect a somewhat saccharine childlike side of
contemporary Japanese art, the show at Japan Society also thoroughly
explores otaku, which translates as geek or nerd, the Japanese subculture
obsessed with fantastic and apocalyptic science fiction, video games, manga
comic books and anime.
Some works offer a peek at the darker side of the psyche, depicting young
girls smoking cigarettes or a boy with his pants down, with suggestions of
prepubescent sexual explorations and pedophilia.
In the 1990's, Mr. Murakami became known for a theory he called Superflat,
which is derived from traditional Japanese painting and has been adopted by
the contemporary-art world to indicate a mix of high and low art. His work
explores how mass-produced entertainment and consumerism have led to a kind
of infantilization of Japanese culture and contemporary aesthetics.
The show is a departure for Japan Society. "We're dealing with broad
areas of popular culture not simply fine art," said Alexandra Munroe,
the society's vice president for arts and culture and the director of its
gallery. "We're introducing the youngest generation of artists we've
ever shown on our walls, most were born in the 1960's and 1970's."
Ms. Munroe said she was hoping for larger crowds than usual for the show,
which runs through July 24. It is the Public Art Fund's first collaboration
with Japan Society and the first time it has been involved in an indoor
exhibition.
In an interview at Japan Society, Mr. Murakami, recognizable by his round
wire glasses, ponytail tucked in a bun and goatee, said he was proud that he
had been able to bring his original drawings for his manga cartoon series to
New York. "A lot of these works are unfamiliar even in Japan," he
said, "It's been very hard to organize because of complicated copyright
issues with some of the manufacturers" of some of the objects. Objects
in the show range from Hello Kitty dolls, Godzilla figures and other
Japanese toys to a painting of a mushroom cloud by Mr. Murakami.
One of the artists in the show, who identified himself as Mr., stood out
at Japan Society on Monday morning in part because of his outfit: a
camouflage-patterned sweater, green baseball cap worn backwards, sunglasses
and dyed blond hair. The artist, 35, has created a work that includes two
figures on pedestals, one of them a young boy with his pants down around his
ankles. Behind the sculptures are a pair of paintings incorporating a male
figure who is unmistakably the artist. Mr. said the work was a comment on
sexual repression in postwar Japanese culture.
"I don't have any siblings," Mr. added, speaking through a
translator. "So I have always been fascinated by children."
- by Carol Vogel NEW
YORK TIMES 6 Apr 2005
Murakami Exhibit is a Popular
Culture ‘Explosion’
Sheldan Collins
A selection of vintage Japanese toys, 1960s–1970s, created by various
makers. The toys are from the collection of Teruhisa Kitahara.
In the years after Japan was defeated in World War II, the country went
into a state of numbing shock. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan not only
obliterated entire cities and wiped out generations of people, but also left
the country’s citizens questioning their identity and culture. Some of the
creative results of this post-war reflection are chronicled in Little
Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. Curated by pop-cult
arbiter Takashi Murakami, the exhibit, which features work by 21 postwar
Japanese artists, is on view through July 24 at New York’s
Japan Society.
The show’s title, Little Boy, is a double entrendre: Besides
being the nickname for the bomb that flattened Hiroshima, it also represents
Murakami’s belief that Japan is a country with an infantilized culture. As
if to underline this last point, many of the pieces in the show are in the
form of animated cartoons, comic books, and advertisements, rendered in the
wildly popular Neo-Pop, anime, and manga styles. Most of the images featured
also had their origins in children’s media, then made their way into other
mainstream and “high” art.
Yet don’t be deceived by the seemingly innocent portrayals: While some of
the pictures in the show are cute and bright, the themes are deadly serious.
Murakami’s Time Bokan–Pink, for example, depicts a skeleton with
an atomic cloud over its head, while Chiho Aoshima’sSublime Grave Dwell
Shinko is a mural-sized illustration that portrays decay in its myriad
forms. Similarly, Shigeru Komatsuzaki’s Underground City is a
stirring post-apocalyptic vision and fantasy of a safe utopia.
“American media has been presenting Japan as a country on the brink of
recession, as a culture that’s almost defunct in some way,” says
Alexandra Monroe, the director of the Japan Society Gallery. She says she
brought the show to the U.S. “to tap into the psyche of contemporary
Japan.”
To further expose that psyche, the Japan Society, along with New York’s
Public Art Fund, will mount several installations created by Little Boy
artists. A Murakami-designed banner will completely cover the façade of the
Society, while Chinatsu Ban will install large yellow fiberglass elephant
sculptures at the southern entrance of Central Park. Later this year, Chiho
Aoshima will cover the city’s Union Square subway station in
computer-generated, large-scale illustrations that will depict a flourishing
magical landscape with glittery trees and oversized characters.
Little Boy is the last installment of Murakami’s Superflat trilogy,
which aims to highlight contemporary Japanese artists and place their work
in a historical context. But on a simpler level, Murakami says the exhibit
also is a celebration of imagination. “The show is not about brandishing
the political scars of the war,” he explains. “The reason I put this
together was because of the completely wasteful and enchanting creations of
human creativity.” - by Andrew Yang METROPOLIS
MAGAZINE 26 Apr 2005 
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