After absorbing the history of American pop art and being inspired by specific pop artists, Takashi Murakami accelerated his career, opening his own ‘Silver Factory’. The idea of a collective creative process was not a new one for him. At university, when he had been working on his diploma project, several friends had offered to help him finish his painting on time. Thanks to these fellow-students, his enormous canvas of a fish with meticulously drawn scales was completed to deadline. This situation was repeated when Murakami fell behind with his graduate diploma work. At that moment in his life he was also teaching preparatory courses to students applying for art college. So, taking advantage of his position, he asked a group of his pupils to help him complete the work. Like his college friends, they agreed to help for free. Or, almost for free: Murakami fed them fried rice and, also importantly, gave them the chance to practice the skills they had picked up in a real project. Ever since, Murakami has treated the group-work format as a regular and desirable part of his practice that is excused by the pressure of time:

After being trialled among students, the cooperative way of working grew into a full-blown art studio: Hiropon Factory, established in the city of Asaka in 1996. The name incorporates yet another post-war allusion: hiropon (‘philopon’) is a synthetic medicine containing methamphetamine. It was initially used ‘for military purposes’, specifically to improve soldiers’ vision. Later, however, it was discovered to have a side effect: uncontrollable aggression and addiction. After the war ended, the stimulant was used by almost two million Japanese, as well as by many Americans who stayed behind after the Japanese islands had been occupied. Murakami seems to be hinting that the production of art objects inspired by otaku possesses a similar, intoxicating effect for both himself and the members of this exotic subculture to whom these objects are addressed.

Murakami’s methods are indeed similar to Warhol’s. Both artists use products of mass culture as the starting points for their works of art: Murakami uses manga and anime; Warhol, advertising and comics. Both manage to create contradictory, borderline images that exploit polar moods: Murakami, the infantility of Japanese kawaii (cuteness) culture and the post-war national trauma; Warhol, superfluity and gloss, the ‘American dream’ of the 1960s and its degradation and transformation into a serial product which was finally cast into oblivion. Murakami’s Hiropon Factory and Warhol’s Factory pursued similar objectives: serial production and exploration of what could be achieved using the media of art. However, the way the processes and hierarchies inside the two groups of people were organized was very different.

Today we would probably call Warhol’s Factory a trendy networking place for New York’s bohemians. Crowds of writers, artists, poets, dancers, photographers, and all who were hungry for 15 minutes of fame packed into the studio in the hope of making contacts, working with Warhol – known, incidentally, to the studio’s occupants as Drella (a portmanteau word formed from Cinderella and Dracula) – or simply hanging out with him. The Factory was everything at once: a studio, a film studio, a bunkhouse, and a public art studio. Here almost anonymous creative individuals no one had ever heard of created silk prints and lithographs under Warhol’s supervision, posed for him, and appeared for free in his films or helped him create advertising – in short, tried desperately to be Warhol-like superstars.

Murakami’s studio has a stronger feeling of a tendency for personal leadership and for planning the steps by which art objects – ranging from monumental canvases to small sculptural forms – are produced. The model for this studio is the system of workshops/studios invented by the Japanese painter Kano Eitoku in the 16th century. Like his predecessor, Murakami has put together a large and strictly regulated team of craftsmen, who, by contrast with the open community formed by Warhol, pass through a competitive selection procedure to ensure they have the requisite technical skills and education. This kind of structure is characteristic of anime and mange studios such as Hayo Miyazaki’s Studip Ghibli. The initiatives and projects thought up by Murakami are realized by workers at the ‘factory’ in the ancient manner – through close following of sketches, step-by-step division into ‘workshops’, and collective discussion. The entire organization is hierarchical and subject to strict, almost militaristic, discipline. Exactly as in large, powerful corporations.

Amazingly, at Hiropon Murakami manages to combine following the traditional, historical model of the Japanese factory with the Postmodernist idea of the artist’s reduced importance in the production of art. In this respect Murakami’s art objects are a kind of evolution of Roland Barthes’ concept of the ‘death of the author’. Beginning in the 1960s, artists’ desire to distance themselves from their own works, to become observers of the process, led for instance, to the emergence of minimalism with its impersonalized objects, to the development of participatory forms of art that swap the positions of creator and viewer, and to the propagation of art produced on an industrial scale. In Murakami’s works the author is still very much ‘alive’ – and in fact his presence is constantly confirmed by endless versions of his own avatar figures. But at the same time, Murakami keeps a distance between himself and his works – through the production process and by delegating the making of the art to workers at his factory. This, incidentally, is also nothing new: Rubens too had no compunction about hiring apprentices to increase productivity and enable him to have several works in production at the same time.

Five years later, in 2001, when Hiropon Factory was scaled up into a corporation and renamed ‘Kaikai Kiki Co’, the difference in how Murakami and Warhol produce art became even more obvious. Murakami emphatically relies on Japanese tradition. The name ‘Kaikai Kiki’ alludes to the Japanese phrase that emerged to describe works by Kano Eitoku – ‘strange and refined, grotesque and tender, but intriguing’. Later, Murakami placed these hieroglyphs on the ears of two figures he created – the sweet white hare Kaikai and the malicious Kiki.

The more hands and heads you have, the more instruments you have with which to express your ideas. Working with his team of assistant artists, Murakami created his first sculptural images: Hiropon, Miss Ko, and My Lonesome Cowboy.

It all began with the blue-eyed blonde Miss Ko. You could easily mistake her for Sailor Moon – the beautiful fair-headed warrioress who was the subject of animes shown on most Russian TV channels in the 1990s. The buxom, long-legged waitress in a mini (micro) sundress is a collective image that combines cliched traits taken from Japan’s bishōjo culture, which fuels a non-realistic and fetishized perception of women. Through these hypertrophied visual traits Murakami revealed the strange desires, hidden fantasies, and deep-lying complexes of otaku, who spend hours at their computer screens in search of such images. Miss Ko is a toy figure similar to those found in their thousands in private collections accumulated by otaku – only blown up to several times its usual size.

Murakami takes sexuality to the next level of absurdity in his sculpture Hiropon. Here the childish expression of the face contrasts strongly with the hypertrophied dimensions of the breasts bursting out of the top of the bikini, from which whipped milk shoots out in a kind of ethereal skipping rope around the girl’s slender body. This is a paradoxical combination of excessive, even frightening perversion and young, almost childish purity and innocence. Murakami has created a caricature-like embodiment of lolicon (the Lolita complex) as well as a reminder of the pornographic underside of the otaku subculture. At the same time, he makes no attempt to criticize this kind of representation of sexuality or objectification. On the contrary, he is merely stating how things are while making a direct appeal to the market and the community that consumes this ‘content’. In his own words:

Additionally, Murakami’s Hiropon sculpture is yet another reminder of Japan’s post-war infantilization. The Japanese redirected their aesthetic and political impulses into escapism – dreams of fantastical creatures, intergalactic battles, nice-looking schoolboy-superheroes, and magical schoolgirl-warriors who are capable of anything.

Another sculpture on the subject of ‘bodily fluids’ that is scabrous by European standards is My Lonesome Cowboy. The ‘cowboy’ is usually exhibited against a background of abstractions with repetitive streams – next to Hiropon, as a couple, as if in some romantic Japanese dorama.   

The ‘cowboy’ has an emaciated boy’s body, skin of a perfectly even pale-pink complexion, neon-blue eyes, and hair sticking out in all directions – as if borrowed from Naruto Uzumaki. Naked, he stands confidently, his feet wide apart, unapologetically holding an erect penis in his hand, splashing around a lasso-like stream of sperm. Visually, the sculpture simultaneously refers to both shunga, a genre of erotic ukiyo-e, where the protagonists are depicted with enlarged genitalia, and hentai, which is modern porn anime. In My Lonesome Cowboy Murakami has concealed a reference to Andy Warhol’s film of the same name, a movie which parodies the patriotic and masculine aesthetic of the Western while in actual fact sliding into anecdotal soft porno. What’s more, the ‘cowboy’ adopts a pose that echoes Elvis Presley’s stance in the film Loving You, where he sings the song ‘Lonesome Cowboy’.

Obviously, Murakami’s My Lonesome Cowboy doesn’t perform any song, but his compressed muscles (in all parts of his body) make it clear he is having difficulty containing the tension that springs from the contradictions actualized by his own presence: masculinity and nice-boy looks; eroticism and revulsion; fetishism and criticism of fetishism; the sexuality which in western art makes the Japanese public so embarrassed and the depravity that floods images in the Japanese’ own otaku subculture; the deceptive superficiality of the chosen language and an overloading with interpretations of the object.

Sculpture became for Murakami yet another way of overcoming the flatness that characterizes Japanese visual culture. First, this is a capability which is inherent from the outset in sculpture as a medium: three-dimensional objects that burst into space are the opposite of the patterned ornamentation and lack of spatial depth in Japanese scrolls. In their volumetric execution Murakami’s images come across as even stranger, even more absurd and exotic. In addition to the literal, physical abandonment of the boundaries of the flat base, Murakami expands and extends the flatness of Japanese culture at the conceptual level – explaining its new forms with the help of the term ‘superflat’.

Historically, Japanese visual culture inherited its flat way of looking at things from Buddhist art. According to the canons of many Japanese Buddhist schools, including Jōdo Shinshū, flat representations of the Buddha are more acceptable to sacred law than three-dimensional ones. Murakami notes that this centuries-long aesthetic contains the opportunity for a new evolutionary twist. He understands superflatness as the current stage in the development of ‘flatness’. He combines the figurative tradition he has identified in works in the genres of Rinpa and ukiyo-e with the lack of depth and kawaii-ness of contemporary Japanese pictures, anime, and manga. In his manifesto Murakami cites as examples of superflat art – examples to which he attributes an equal degree of influence – works by artists from very different periods, including, for instance, Katsushika Hokusai, Kano Sansetsu, Henmaru Machino, and Yoshinori Kanada.

Superflatness also constitutes an investigation into Japanese post-war consumer culture – flat, superficial, and shaped by both the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ and a sense of collective guilt. The well-fed consumerism that existed in western civilizations was impossible in Japan following the country’s defeat in World War II. The mass consumption which marked the economic boom in the 1980s was imitative, tended towards overcompensation, and was imbued with a look-at-me desire to catch up with the achievements of the winning country. The production boom, the proliferating culture of comics, the imitation of pop-art artists, and westernized tendences in film, photography, and fashion: Murakami treats all this as ‘a massive departure from the real’, as superficial, lacking depth, having no clear boundaries (and so promising the possibility that these boundaries will be eroded entirely), dichotomic, and uniting the old and new, the traditional and the modern, the Japanese and the non-Japanese, the frightening and the nice, the naïve and the traumatic, the deeply conceptual and the briefly entertaining, the mass and the exclusive, the luxurious and the easily affordable, and the low and the high.

All this is superflat.

Superflat made its debut in a series of exhibitions of the same name at the beginning of the 2000s curated by Murakami himself – first in Japan, then in Boston, New York, and Paris. The exhibitions contained works by Murakami’s fellow-countrymen, including Shigeyosi Ohi, Yoshitimo Nara, and Aya Takano. As these artists increasingly felt their way towards the latest Japanese identity through ‘superflatness’, Murakami’s theory went from being a mere title in an exhibition catalogue to an English-language neologism that could be easily googled. ‘Superflat’ began to be used as an unofficial definition of Japanese pop art – the first movement to become known internationally since the Gutai Art Association in the 1950s.

Transforming and developing in discourses in various fields, the label ‘superflat’ began to be applied in areas that might seem unexpected. For instance, in architecture – to describe the tendency for flat forms in buildings by Japanese architects such as Toyo Ito, Hitoshi Abe, and Jun Aoki, etc. ‘Superflatness’ became easily digestible, a total term, and a synonym for assimilation and unification, the erosion of distinctions and hierarchies, interdisciplinarity – everything that unfailingly leads to arguments among art critics.   

The essence of Murakami’s genius is that he launched a term which possesses a flexibility that is extraordinary in the world of art, a field not generally characterized by flexibility. He gives an account of profoundly national elements in Japanese culture in such a way as to make them interesting to the western public, which is well versed in the theory of art and intrigued by Japanese pop exoticism. Superflatness congenially lends itself to interpretations, theories, and attacks of all kinds – be they parallels with Clement Greenberg’s definition of ‘alloverness’, as applied to the painting of Jackson Pollock, or with Leo Steinberg’s theory of the ‘flatbed flatness’ of works by Robert Rauschenberg. Art historians can with impunity apply to it their Lacanian, Derrida-ian, Deleuszan, or ‘insert-your-own-favourite-philosopher-here-ian’ approaches. Fans of otaku can note the allusions to their favourite games or animes. And at the very least, we can all open our mouths in wonder at the production capacities, scale, chromatic brightness, ideally polished surfaces, and unfamiliarly deviant sexuality – while we wait our turn at the cash till in the museum souvenir shop.

One of the most vivid examples (or trademarks) of the superflat art created by Murakami is his Murakami Flowers. Murakami drew his first pair of flowers in 1995 – placing them against a laconic grey background so as to concentrate all attention on the cluster of colourful flowers in the middle of the picture. In the next iteration the flowers are indeed grouped to form a cluster, a lump, a sphere – in which the movement of the smiling cores seems to unfold this formation, accelerating it so that it jumps out at the viewer. Murakami drew inspiration for this image from a traditional Nihonga motif: the setsugetsuka, which means ‘snow, moon, flowers’. This expression first appeared in a poem by Tan Bai Juyi and in the Japanese language became a metonym for the beautiful landscapes in Japanese nature.

Murakami drew entire networks of flowers that entwine themselves in fantastic curls of ivy in the decorative manner of traditional Japanese screens. In the 2000s Murakami ‘grew’ entire meadows of flattened daisies of different colours. Rejecting a single-shade flat background, he placed the daisies against a background of curly clouds similar to those we see in the landscapes of Hayao Miyazaki. If you look hard enough into the rippling fields of stalks, you’ll notice an allusion to the version of the above motif: at the very bottom of the picture Murakami has hidden a curling green sprout that has not yet matured into a plant with a broad smile.

In 2005 Murakami filled the entire surface of his canvas with his flat buds to create Flower Superflat. Here the stream of gaudy flowers – flowers that are also shouting out something – became a metaphor for today’s world of mass culture in which Japan is becoming just one more indistinguishable flower in an enormous bouquet. Thus Murakami conveys the influence of globalization and the culture of consumption which he sees as depriving his country of its unique traditions. At the same time, we should note that the grey background that can in places be glimpsed through the accumulations of flowers would in itself look fairly dull and monotonous. Is Murakami’s ‘floral superflatness’ an image of that same Japan which, intoxicated by history, took from other cultures without a thought for its own heritage? Or is it just that a balance has to be struck between the restrained background and the unrestrained flowers.

Murakami’s smiling flowers radiate joy without end. Observe this joy for any length of time, and you’ll see the viewer’s smiling response give way to tension and anxiety. Because this smile is so intense that at a certain point it loses its association with anything human or vital. It is as if the flowers have involuntarily frozen with the expression of this emotion. As if they have retreated inwards, and to prevent anyone noticing, camouflaged themselves with the strongest possible smile. Their gaze is frozen but not vacant. We may note the fluctuating gleams in their eyes – gleams held in place by the glassy surface of the tears. The state of these flowers resembles an experience of profound rumination, of non-presence in presence, a moment of flight from reality, an act of the escapism which imbues almost all Japan’s post-war art. Murakami conceals the suppressed, not fully lived through, contradictory emotions of the flowers behind a tense radiance, similar to how people live through the collective psychological trauma caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Such a rethinking of painful events is possible, it seems, only in the Japanese mentality: now you can buy a sublimation of this traumatic experience on eBay in the form of a decorative rainbow pillow.

And not just in this form. A cameo of flowers appeared in the revamp of Louis Vuitton’s monogram when Murakami began a years-long collaboration with the fashion house in 2002. The radiant sunflowers lost several petals in the process of stylization, becoming four-pointed smiling flowers with the brand’s signature stitchwork. Subsequently, Murakami entirely reworked the Louis Vuitton, colouring it in bright neon colours and adding his own signature ‘jellyfish eye’ to the initials of the firm’s founding father, as well as a quatrefoil and a rhombus. Interestingly, the graphic elements on the brand’s stitchwork have their origin in the influence of the late Victorian tendency to use Japanese mon drawings – a kind of family coat-of-arms..

Thanks to the brand’s then creative director Marc Jacobs, Murakami was given what was probably the largest venue for presenting his Superflat concept – the fashion industry. This was one of the first fusions of high art and trend-setting fashion, something that has since become a familiar approach – think Damien Hirst and his skulls on dresses created by Alexander McQueen, Tracey Emin’s eclectic bags for Longchamp, and, recently, Yayoi Kusama’s spot patterns on objects by Louis Vuitton. Marc Jacobs recalls how when Murakami first set foot in the firm’s Paris office, he said:

And Murakami was right: the pieces that resulted from this collaboration became some of the most desired objects of the time and continue to attract collectors to this day. At the peak of his collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2003, Murakami was literally everywhere: his large paintings and sculptures were selling at auctions for sums north of half a million dollars, while his serial works and merch could be bought for just a handful of dollars. Never before had an art movement self-proclaimed by a single person been marketed so successfully or had such a grip on the market
at all levels.