The colorful and avant-garde art of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami will be seen in Valencia until next December 29. His lithographs, which fuse traditional Japanese painting techniques with groundbreaking modern art can be seen in the exhibition hall La Llotgeta of the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo (CAM).

Known as the Japanese Andy Warhol, his unique style has created a new genre which also gives name to the exhibition “Superflat “, whose title refers to the fact that the pictorial space in his work is literally flat as can be read the same way from different points of view. Superflat is an artistic style that comments on Otaku lifestyle and subculture, as well as consumerism and sexual fetishism.

Like Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami takes low culture and repackages it, and sells it to the highest bidder in the “high-art” market. Unlike Warhol, Murakami also makes his repacked low culture available to all other markets in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, T-shirts, key chains, mouse pads, plush dolls, cell phone caddies, and $5,000 limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags. This is comparable to Claes Oldenburg, who sold his own low art, high art pieces in his own store front in the 1960s. What makes Murakami different is his methods of production, and his work is not in one store front but many, ranging from toy stores, candy aisles, comic book stores, and the French design house of Louis Vuitton. Murakami’s style is an amalgam of his Western predecessors, Warhol, Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as Japanese predecessors and contemporaries of anime and manga. He has successfully marketed himself to Western culture and to Japan in the form of Kaikai Kiki and GEISAI.

Interviewer Magdalene Perez asked him about straddling the line between art and commercial products, and mixing art with branding and merchandizing. Murakami said, “I don’t think of it as straddling. I think of it as changing the line. What I’ve been talking about for years is how in Japan, that line is less defined. Both by the culture and by the post-War economic situation. Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of ‘high art.’ In the West, it certainly is dangerous to blend the two because people will throw all sorts of stones. But that’s okay—I’m ready with my hard hat.”

Interview with Takashi Murakami by Jonathan Ross on Japanorama.

Full short film celebrating six years of collaboration between Murakami and Vuitton.

In parallel to the Superflat exhibition, CAM has organized a series of lectures on Japanese and Asian cinema, about the pictures of that country and Japan’s architecture. In addition, on November 27 starts a cycle of films under the title Fifty years of Japanese cinema. The cycle includes jewels of cinema as Munakata Sisters (1950), Yasujiro Ozu, or Rhapsody in August (1991), Akira Kurosawa, and contemporary works like Zatoichi (2003) and Sonatine (1993), both by Takeshi Kitano, or Kairo (2001), by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and classics like The Empire of Passion (1978), Nagisa Oshima, and The Beyond (1964) by Kobayashi Masaki.

Source: www.elpais.com and www.wikipedia.org

Useful info

Superflat by Takashi Murakami / until 29 December 2009

• La llotgeta. Aula de Cultura de la CAM (See on Google Maps)
• Phone: 963 913 396

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