Academicc Assigment , On one of my Inspiring chossen Artists.

Marakumi Takasha

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1963 and studied at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and music.
In addition to his work as an artist, Takashi Murakami is a curator, entrepreneur, and a student of contemporary Japanese society. In 2000, Murakami curated an exhibition of Japanese art, titled Super flat, which acknowledged a movement toward mass-produced entertainment and its effects on contemporary aesthetics.
Murakami is also internationally recognized and famous for his collaboration with designer Marc Jacobs to create handbags and other products for the Louis Vuitton fashion house.
Takashi Murakami's work has been exhibited in prestigious museums all over the world, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and a recent solo retrospective exhibition at the Bard College Museum of Art. Through his work, Murakami has played with these oppositions in East and West, past and present, high art and low culture while remaining consistently amusing and accessible. His work morphs the world’s popular contemporary Japanese cartoons and historic Japanese painting in the traditional nihon-ga style).
 His recurring character, Mr.DOB, appears on t-shirts, posters, key-chains, etc. world-wide and has even come to life in the form of one of these 3-D sculptures. Murakami has also curated "Super Flat" an exhibition of contemporary Japanese artists.




Murakami and Louis Vuitton

Murakami’s style, called super flat, is characterized by flat planes of colour and graphic images involving a character style derived from anime and manga. Super flat 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 a comparable idea to Claes Oldenburg, who sold his own low art, high art pieces in his own store front in the 1960s, but 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 powerhouse of Louis Vuitton. Murakami’s style is an amalgam of his Western predecessors, Warhol, Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein as well as his 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. In response to interviewer Magdalene Perez’s question about the dangers of 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. 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.”

Murakami also collaborated with Kanye West and designed his Album cover. Adored by everyone his talent and his amazing work.

He has inspired me as an artist as he is bold, different, colourful, and not shy his work is powerful and inspires me.