MAD FOR MURAKAMI

When I was in Hong Kong in May for the opening of Louis Vuitton’s A Passion for Creation exhibition at the HK Museum of Art, I got to meet the lovely Mr Takashi Murakami - contemporary art’s cutest contributor and Louis Vuitton’s ongoing collaborator. We sat down in his pop-tastic corner of the exhibition and talked about his menacingly smiley vision of the world. Here’s what he had to say…

He’s oh so high tech. His computer is his paintbrush and, like Warhol before him, has a whole factory at work on his pieces. “Anytime I’m using my factory’s creative process, I cannot say ‘my’ piece, I can say ‘our’ piece. Everything in my studio is a collaboration with many people. It’s a general business. I employ 120 people. We make animation work now and also live action film, which will be released next year.”

There was no beating around the bush when it came to working with Vuitton. “It was a very fast collaboration. Marc emailed me and asked if I was interested in working with Louis Vuitton and my answer was ‘yes’ and the next day I flew to Paris and we talked for 30 minutes, that’s it. And in this short communication I had to find out what is the question to answer? So that challenge was a very, very ambitious project. We have a very good timing. It’s kind of like a marriage, you fall in love…

The collaboration with Louis Vuitton in turn inspired his own art. “When I started my travelling show, Copycat Murakami, I asked Marc if we could make a collaboration with the product because I love camouflage and I asked if I could produce my camouflage with the Louis Vuitton Monogram and he immediately said yes. So for example, the canvas, everything, came from Louis Vuitton and we just stretched it onto a frame. I believe this is truly my art piece. It comes from Marcel Duchamp’s Ready Made, this is a Ready Made bag to me, from the bag to the [art] product, it’s a really strange cycle. Some people say this is not art, but I believe myself this is my true art. Everything I believe has the same value. Before, I had never worked with fashion, but after the collaboration with Marc and Louis Vuitton it forced me to communicate with what is fashion and art and what’s inside the Tokyo fashion culture?”

His disposition is not as sunny as it first appears. “All the time, I’m very angry about everything, like ‘oh my god, the room service is so late’ like ‘I want to take a nap’ but this is my personality. When I was a kid in junior high school, I wondered why I was so upset all the time. This is my problem, maybe. I believe I chose the profession of an artist because I couldn’t interact with other people. Hopelessness is my main theme. You know, smiling face, but at the same time, double faced…”

He believes the recession will be good for the art world. “When I debuted, no one cared. But because no one cared, it was a good art piece, I think? It wasn’t linked with money, it was just a concept and just a communication through the work, that it true art. Now it is a business too also, so that is really sad. But after the crash we can come back to honest opinion and an honest way to make an art piece. So in two, three years maybe everyone can see the really good art pieces. The very young artists that no one knows will come up, so it’s really good timing.”

But he also believes in the business of art – his factory churns out everything from million dollar pieces to cheap toys and mementos you can buy online. “ I learn a lot from Hiyoku, the Japanese print stuff was very cheap price and low level value when [it was] created 300 years ago, and now it’s an art piece. So anything has the possibility in the future to be a treasure. That’s why each piece can’t be divided into the level in which it was created. When I make each piece, for example the postcard and a painting, there’s the same attention. Sometimes my young assistants wonder ‘why Takashi, this is a postcard’? Yes but it has the possibility in the future to be a treasure also, this is my concept.”