The Pop Artist Strikes a Different Tone in the Wake of the Fukushima Disaster
Japan’s explosive master of color Takashi Murakami contemplates the shifting purpose of his work in today’s short from Friend & Colleague. The Tokyo-born artist was interviewed while surrounded by new pieces at his Arhat exhibition at LA’s Blum & Poe gallery, shortly after the international premiere of fantastical epic Jellyfish Eyes,
which took place at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in April.
Murakami has earned major retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum, MOCA in
Los Angeles and the Château de Versailles, and last year had a solo
show at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. His new feature film
is a more sentimental and sincere undertaking than his previous
work and follows a young boy in Japan mourning the death of his father
and readjusting to life while striking up an unlikely companionship with
a creature that resembles a flying jellyfish. The ironic undercurrents
typical of the artist are noticeably absent, in light of the disasters
that have rocked Japan in the last two years, following the 2011
earthquake and tsunami, and the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. “He
is well known for his loud and sometimes shocking work,” says director
Alexei Tylevich of Murakami’s apparent about-face. “It was really
surprising to hear him talk about unexpected notions like ‘spirituality’
and ‘healing.’”
