Marvelous Mr Murakami

Every country in lockdown has had a unique response to COVID-19. Italians serenaded their neighbours across balconies, Indians clanged pots and pans, Canadians applauded medical staff through the night and the Lebanese drone-delivered roses to mark Mother’s Day. In Japan, a curious creature became a social media sensation to fight the virus as artists started sharing their illustrations of the Amabie. A benevolent spirit from Japanese folklore, the Amabie looks like a cross between a long-haired mermaid and an owl in a parakeet costume. The legend goes that seeing and sharing its photo can ward off infectious disease. It didn’t take long for the savvy Takashi Murakami to join this viral #amabiechallenge with his own interpretation of the mythic creature. “Amabie has become a popular yōkai [spirit] in Japan, and I am glad I could spread it to people abroad through my posts,” shares the artist over email. 

CUTE YET CURRENT 

Like Japan, where inanimate characters take on life as mascots for different cities, Murakami’s wildly eclectic work delights in colour as manga characters and anime cartoons are stripped of insouciance and injected with feeling and, at times, spirituality. “In Japan, given how we experience one natural disaster after another, the belief in multitudinous gods, and in being humble towards nature, remains mainstream. The characters of fantastical lands in my work inherit this metaphor of the belief in multitudinous gods.” When Vogue India asked the Japanese artist to conceive a cover for the June issue amidst the lockdown, he offered his interpretation of the post-pandemic world by playing with his signature flowers to create a ‘Flowerball’ against a blue backdrop. Each flower, comprising 12 rounded petals, is first sketched in a notebook, then scanned and painted on Adobe Illustrator. Murakami, who is represented by Perrotin gallery, adds, “I went through the process of changing the colours and made a new background.” An explosion of candy-hued smiling flowers, the cover offers a jubilant spin on his recurring motif. “Under the current circumstance, where people are sensitive to whatever you do, I made this cover hoping it will become a trigger for them to exert their great tolerance. For the background, I pictured a blue sky,” he notes. Flowers are so emblematic of Murakami that when the popular artist made his India debut earlier this year, via a trip organised by Geek Picture India’s Arjun Aggarwal, art patron Isha Ambani Piramal showered over 10,000 orange and pink flowers for his welcome at Antilia.

CREATIVITY IN A CRISIS 

But Murakami’s work is as multifarious as his medium, spanning larger-than-life phantasmagorical sculptures to swirling designs on shoes and bags. His ‘superflat’ aesthetic combines the finesse of traditional Japanese block prints with the slickness of pop art (inspired by the trio of manga, anime and video games) to such an effect that even overfamiliar emoticons like the smiling flower find a new lease of life in his hands. 

He may not have the heft of classical art’s mighty masters, but he offers a delightful interpretation of the zeitgeist through work that is simple yet complex. Peel back the veneer of cuteness (kawaii in Japanese), and beneath his army of jolly characters and trippy colours, you’ll find a panoply of art that often responds to the world around him. His show, Little Boy (2005), directly references the Hiroshima bombing. The 2011 tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster too have inspired works like ‘The 500 Arhats’ (2015), featuring contorted, ageing figures as well as his first feature film, Jellyfish Eyes (2013), which marks a departure from his usual style by putting the focus on darker subjects. 

Has the pandemic affected his artistic universe in any way? “Living in the suburbs of Tokyo, we are always at the risk of encountering the next Great Kantō Earthquake. This means we always have to be conscious of the possibility of dying from a catastrophic earthquake that will take away many lives. Our feeling of awe towards death therefore originates in acknowledging our proximity to it,” he explains. “I believe that the experience of the current pandemic has made more people familiar with death, and in that sense, more people could have a deeper discovery concerning the idea of death that is hidden in my work.” 

In his 2012 exhibit, Flowers And Skulls, which features a dizzying selection of his iconic flowers alongside skulls, he captures this dual theme of life and death. But, as an artist, how does he convert the fear of a pandemic into hope for the future? Murakami says that the answer lies “through the activation of a new philosophy regarding the boundary of life and death.” He adds, “Then, I believe ours could become a more comfortable society to live in.” 

For now, as the global lockdown shakes economies the world over, the art world is feeling the repercussions too. It’s even more evident when an artist who has been celebrated and criticised in equal measure for his unabashed commercialism, and has collaborated with bigwigs like Louis Vuitton and, more recently, Billie Eilish, talks about his plans for 2020 thus: “I will simply try my best so that my company does not go bankrupt. All my shops are closed and it is not certain when they can reopen.” While critics may see art as non-essential in a pandemic, the way creators like Murakami have responded to a crisis time and again shows us that art might just be our only solace.