PERSPECTIVE
(^126) | APRIL 2016
THERE IS SOMETHING PROFOUNDLY INTIMATE ABOUT
getting the opportunity to be privy to someone’s collection,
and when that person happens to be one of the most
famous artists in the world, well, you’re getting an inside
look into the intimate creative process of a maker and
creator. It becomes a study in intent and interest, and those
proclivities become even more compelling when the subject
is an established celebrity.
Takashi Murakami recently unveiled his vaunted Superflat
Collection at the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan, and
our interest was so piqued that we flew across the Pacific
to see it opening weekend. Murakami has always been
a man of contrasts. Offbeat and eccentric interests have
informed and influenced his long-established blue-chip art
world credentials, and his declarative Superflat philosophy
seeks to examine just how indistinguishable the worlds
of high and low art can be when put into a particular
context. For Murakami, that context is his collection and
dedicatedly random assortment that offers Kiefers alongside
Shrigleys, Grotjahns with Kim Jung Gi, or even centuries-
old Japanese ceramics with KAWS. What stands out about
the Superflat Collection was, and will continue to be, the
honesty. He writes in the exhibition’s statement “What
is art? When I contemplate that question, I come to the
conclusion that it is the crystallization of culture; that is, the
social circumstances, human relationships and ephemera
of the eras in which we live.” And this collection really is a
reflection of how we consume culture in our daily lives—on
blogs, social media, news, on each city block, every second
of our day, high and low cultures slammed together in one
“flattened” package. It is the collection of an artist immersed
with history and the present: instinctive rule-breaking with
natural impulse.
Murakami has long been an artist who is comfortable as
contemporary mega star, as well as avid champion of the
underground and the authentically groundbreaking works
being created in all facets of art. For us, and we suspect, our
readers, we aspire to that same fearlessness. —Evan Pricco
Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection will be on display at the
Yokohama Museum of Art through April 3, 2016.
FLATNESS IS STILL THE RULE
TAKASHI MURAKAMI OPENS THE VAULTS TO HIS COLLECTION
Photo by
Yuichiro Tanaka