Businessman, Artist, Opportunist: Takashi Murakami's First Mainland China Show Has Just Closed

From the ten-million-dollar My Lonesome Cowboy to a return to the Japanese painting tradition, Takashi Murakami has always moved through the art world wearing labels and costumes.

Takashi Murakami has never shied away from talking about money. He wrote a rambling book called Art Entrepreneurship Theory (《艺术创业论》), one section of which is titled "Why My Paintings Sell for 100 Million."

Most artists keep the word "marketing" at arm's length, if they don't treat it as the devil outright. Murakami talks about it freely. He grants that media hype has value, and he urges younger artists to see that "the customers of art are extremely wealthy people" — even when the money is Russian dirty money — and that anything that becomes an international trend is something you must throw yourself into. Price, he says, is the only reliable measure of worth: in entertainment, and in art too.

Murakami's first solo exhibition in China has just closed at Perrotin (Shanghai), a gallery known worldwide. If you went, you may remember the more than 20 works spread across three rooms — every one of them titled Untitled.

The show was called "Takashi Murakami in Wonderland," and it ran through the Murakami motifs Chinese audiences know best: Mr. DOB, with his sharp teeth, huge eyes and mouse ears; the candy-colored, beaming flower — painted in flat two dimensions in acrylic on canvas, or built as fiberglass sculpture. The rooms were decorated with these simple geometric shapes and bright colors, and visitors kept stepping up to have their pictures taken.

In another room, a few works several meters across compressed far more complicated material. "I've found something really interesting," one young man told his friends, pointing at a shape that looked like male genitalia.

Another visitor said Murakami's work made her think of today's "fast culture." Few people stayed more than half an hour. Like most exhibitions now, like most goods, Murakami's work is made for quick consumption, not deep thought.

On opening day, the flower plush cushions in the gift shop, priced at around 1,000 yuan, sold out fast. Staff remembered that buyers "hardly even looked at the price."

The day before the show opened, Perrotin (Shanghai) threw Murakami an opening reception. As he does at openings all over the world, he wore an outlandish costume and posed for photos with invited guests. Murakami has explained that the costume is his device for "attracting audiences and media coverage," a way of covering for his weak English.

Murakami's first solo show abroad was held at Perrotin (Paris) in 1995. Two years before that, he had met the gallery's owner, the artist Emmanuel Perrotin, at a fair in Tokyo. After Paris, the name Takashi Murakami began turning up in museums across the United States and Europe. He opened his market abroad first.

The partnership with Perrotin was partly chance. But the strategy of exporting first and selling back home later was something Murakami thought through carefully.

In 1993, Murakami became the first person to earn a doctorate in Nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, from the Tokyo University of the Arts. The traditional technique did nothing to move collectors. All it won him was a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council, which let him spend a year in New York.

That year proved decisive. If Paris was the capital of the art world in the first half of the 20th century, New York was crowned in the second half. However much contempt contemporary art attracted, rich Americans went on, as if possessed, moving Pop and Abstract Expressionism into their living rooms. Around the same time, Damien Hirst showed Britain a shark suspended in formaldehyde, meant to convey "the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living." The shark sold for an astronomical sum.

Why could de Kooning do it, and Hirst do it, and not him? Murakami brought up those names often. He believed he had found the real gap between Japanese and Western art: the West had a mature art market and a marketing playbook, while Japanese artists — even the ones who called themselves avant-garde — were only copying Western forms.

He took a fairly "deconstructive" view of art history: it was not only the record of what artists made, but also a tool for pushing work into the market. An artist's job was to leave a personal mark on the line of art history, and let price prove how deep the mark went.

Murakami treated Andy Warhol as the model for these rules. Warhol photographed Marilyn Monroe, Yoko Ono and himself, worked the celebrity party circuit, carried a can of tomato soup from the supermarket into the museum, and made no secret of wanting fame and money. For Warhol, art did not have to be refined, did not conflict with commerce at all, and might simply be the same thing as commerce. Murakami inherited that cynical stance whole, so completely that he came to be called "the Andy Warhol of Japan."

But there could be only one Warhol. As a Japanese artist, Murakami seemed to feel a natural obligation to tell a slightly different story. He named that story "Superflat." In 2000 he curated a contemporary-art group show in Tokyo under the Superflat banner; it traveled to Los Angeles the next year, and Western critics started noticing the label.

By Murakami's account, the postwar Japanese anime and manga shaped by American culture had carried on the tradition of Nihonga: no perspective, no shading, none of the three-dimensional effects those devices produce. Mr. DOB was made on that principle. With no species markers beyond a pair of mouse ears, he calls Mickey Mouse to mind, but without the depth the hand-drawn era built up. He is nothing more than a few basic geometric shapes and letters — no trouble at all for any CG artist.

More important than the description of a style, Murakami used "Superflat" to describe postwar Japanese society: distinctions of class and taste no longer meant much, and young people raised in a consumer society had lost any depth of understanding of historical events like the atomic bombings, turning into otaku who cared only about their own consumption and about virtual worlds.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Murakami produced a sculpture titled My Lonesome Cowboy: a naked boy with the exploding hair of Japanese anime and games, gripping his genitals and spraying an absurd quantity of semen around him. The piece looked like an extension of Hiropon, made in 1997 — a large-breasted girl squeezing her nipple, sending an equally absurd stream of white milk swirling around her.

The pornographic subject matter of both works recalls Jeff Koons, the idol Murakami discovered in New York. Between 1989 and 1991, Koons made a series of sculptures, some of them life-size, under the title Made in Heaven, showing sex between the artist and his partner. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Murakami also likes to cast himself as the subject of his own work. For his Qatar solo show Ego, he made a six-meter sculpture of himself, sitting cross-legged in meditation.

Of the much-argued-over Hiropon, Murakami said it stood for "the deep history of Japanese subculture, Japanese sexual insecurity, and an increasingly perverse sexual culture." In fact, the Japanese word for perverse most likely crossed into English as "hentai" in the 1990s — the same years that Japanese anime, and otaku culture with it, arrived in the United States. In a sense, Murakami was not presenting a new reality. He was a Japanese artist reinforcing the picture of contemporary Japan that Western audiences were already assembling. As Minami Yusuke, curator of Murakami's solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, put it, Murakami arranged a careful program for the Western market with one aim, to become famous — and he undeniably succeeded.

Naturally, this made some Japanese uneasy. Yoshiko Shimada, a feminist and antiwar artist, argued that Murakami's partnership with the Western art world amounted to a collusive orientalism, in which he used the West's misreadings of Japan to establish his own position.

Questions like that did little to disturb Murakami's run at the gold. What he cared about was art stripped of its mystique — or, put plainly, art that gets bought and sold.

In 2003, one Murakami work sold for 68 million yen; in 2006, his 727 went for more than 100 million yen at auction, making him at the time the Japanese artist with the highest price for a single work. 727 looks like a snarling cartoon figure fused with Katsushika Hokusai's ukiyo-e print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, in storybook-bright color. Simple and reproducible: that is a fair summary of Murakami's early work.

Miniature copies of Hiropon — action figures, in effect — sold well in the gift shops of Murakami's exhibitions. He built a close relationship with Louis Vuitton. At the large 2007 retrospective "©MURAKAMI" in Los Angeles, visitors could buy not only Murakami merchandise but also spend their money in a Louis Vuitton boutique of nearly 100 square meters, installed for the show.

In 2002, Marc Jacobs, later Louis Vuitton's creative director, asked Murakami to combine the cartoon octopus eyes he had been painting with the LV logo, into a pattern for handbags and scarves. You have probably seen the design: the classic Louis Vuitton monogram painted in candy colors, woven together with the cartoon octopus eyes across the canvas. Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson both carried the multicolor monogram bag. Given how popular it was, Louis Vuitton mounted the pattern on the facade of its Fifth Avenue flagship in New York in 2008.

Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, explained why he brought Louis Vuitton into the museum. The personal brand Murakami had built, he said, was the most radical part of his work, and ignoring the commercial side of art was like ignoring "the elephant in the room."

That may convince some people who work in art. But for most of the people who saw the show and bought the bags, those colorful monogram patterns carried no radical meaning at all. It was just a good-looking bag.

No other artist has had as long a run with Louis Vuitton (the partnership ended in 2015). It mattered enormously for Murakami: many consumers never saw the dark, pornographic works at all, and came to know him through Louis Vuitton. A bag costing a thousand-odd dollars is something a middle-class buyer can reach with a bit of effort, or at worst save to a wish list. In fashion it counts as a luxury good; in art it does not.

Murakami caught a turn in fashion and art at the right moment. The art world was moving toward pop culture and consumerism while leaving room for interpretation; luxury brands were trying to shed their remoteness by importing contemporary art, or by hiring streetwear designers like Virgil Abloh. Blurring the border between the two suited everyone. The critic Francesco Spampinato summed up the effect of the Murakami–Louis Vuitton collaboration this way: it made luxury a little less luxurious, and art a little less art.

Around 2008, Murakami's influence in overseas markets peaked. Los Angeles, New York, Frankfurt and Bilbao each hosted the "©MURAKAMI" retrospective. My Lonesome Cowboy sold for $13.5 million in 2008, far past the self-satisfied "100-million-yen artist" of Art Entrepreneurship Theory. He began working with the rapper Kanye West, making music videos and album covers for him, and kept flying the MURAKAMI banner in fashion.

But like the octopus he once painted eating its own leg, the brand-building Murakami carried out on consumerism's short-and-fast logic carried the risk of consuming itself. He was still a guaranteed draw at museums abroad, and the Palace of Versailles overrode considerable objection to make good on its invitation to show his work. Yet the collectors' market seemed to have used up its enthusiasm for him.

The year after the financial crisis, Murakami dropped from his 2008 auction records; by 2014, his work totaled less than $3 million at auction for the year, below Yoshitomo Nara's $9.41 million (according to research by Liu Zhenfeng). Nara's tender oil paintings gave him a broader, more varied market base, especially in East Asia. Murakami's anime style, descended from Pop art and shot through with dark material, lost out in this shift of market fashion.

Murakami could smell it. Asked in 2018 by the youth-culture magazine i-D about "the most important shift happening in the art world today," he did not hedge:

"Over the past 10 years the Chinese art market has grown very large. Almost the same size as the West's. But Western taste and Chinese taste are completely different, so you're making work for two crowds and two kinds of taste at once. The Hong Kong art fair, for example, looks no different from Basel in Switzerland, but it actually is completely different. I think that's the biggest change, and in the next five years it will stand out even more."

The market was changing, so the strategy for making work had to change with it.

From 2009 to 2011, Murakami and Nobuo Tsuji, a professor of Japanese art history, held 21 rounds of a "Japanese painting contest" (Nippon e'awase) for the magazine Geijutsu Shincho. Murakami competed himself, and at Tsuji's request painted a copy of Dragons and Clouds (《云龙图》), an 18th-century ink-on-paper work by Soga Shohaku. This time he really did pick up the brush, with no assistants at all, as if to announce to the art world that the Nihonga doctor was back — though he was already famous enough.

Through the exchange with Tsuji, Murakami hoped to connect himself to a certain heterodox tradition in Japanese art history. It did two things at once: it widened the range of material he could work with, setting him apart from the "second Warhol" that Western judges had gradually tired of, and it gave his personal brand a new story that hung together.

Murakami's studio published a new English translation of Tsuji's book Lineage of Eccentrics and made it the theme of his 2017 solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This was as good as an indirect instruction to critics: Murakami himself belongs to the lineage of eccentrics, and that is where his value lies.

In 2015 and 2016, Murakami held a vast solo exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. That was out of the ordinary for him: he had not shown solo in Japan for 14 years. His export strategy had proved a clever move; now he needed to win back the recognition of his own countrymen.

The centerpiece of the show was The 500 Arhats. After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, sponsored by the Qatari royal family and helped by several hundred art students, Murakami completed this scroll, 100 meters long and 3 meters high. It uses the riot of color, the strange forms and the flying flames that fill his work, but its subject comes from traditional Buddhist culture: how monks help ordinary people face catastrophe.

Shown alongside The 500 Arhats were works on the same subject by the Edo-period painters Kano Kazunobu and Nagasawa Rosetsu. The pairing was plainly meant to remind Japanese viewers that Murakami, famous as he was as a "world artist," was in the end Japanese like them, caring about the same things.

For foreign audiences, Murakami introduced the meaning of The 500 Arhats this way: "In the past, whenever disaster struck, monks would paint, to preach a religious spirit to people who were suffering. I made The 500 Arhats as the equivalent of those paintings. It is a painting to console people. Maybe it is my Guernica."

In 2016, Murakami received the Minister of Education Award at the 66th Japan Art Encouragement Prizes.

"I changed my own view of him a great deal, too, after seeing Mr. Murakami's solo show 'The 500 Arhats' at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo," Zhu Yu, director of Perrotin in Hong Kong and Shanghai, told reporters.

She went on to mention the three "post-apocalyptic" works shown at Perrotin (Shanghai). The paintings hold candy-colored flowers, black holes, an enormous cartoon figure with tentacles and compound eyes swallowing everything in front of it, and violence rendered in detail. "You can feel that they are completely different from the other flowers, the works ordinary people find more commercial. You can feel that force, that shock."

Right after the grand Tokyo show, in the first half of 2017, Murakami and Perrotin (Shanghai) settled the arrangements for this exhibition. It was not the first show in China to call itself a Murakami solo exhibition. Over the past year, fake Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami exhibitions appeared in several cities, until Kusama's lawyers exposed them in September. Murakami's lawyer, Kamiyama Hiroshi, called the fake shows "extremely vile" and said he was considering legal action. He added: "Murakami's work is popular in the Chinese art market, and it has become an object of speculation."

The sequel to the fake-exhibition affair: in less than two months, Kusama and Murakami both opened solo shows in Shanghai. The press reminded audiences — this time it's real.

Cover and banner photo: thierry ehrmann

Vertical cover photo: Matthew Sperzel/Getty Images, via VCG (Visual China Group)