Pop Go the Usual Boundaries

It takes three subway trains, two taxis and an hour and a half to reach the suburb of Saitama and Hiropon Factory, the studio of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Jeremy Strick, director of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA curator Michael Darling, and Paul Johnson, the museum’s new director of development, have been en route on this hot October day, with the help of Murakami’s L.A. art dealer, Tim Blum, who is--happily--fluent in both Japanese and the Tokyo public transport system.

The journey’s goal is a Quonset hut in the middle of a bamboo field, where Murakami, 38, offers warm greetings at the door. His round face is accentuated by round glasses, and he wears the goatee and many-pocketed sports clothing favored by film directors.

After requesting the removal of all shoes, he ushers the group into the tidy studio to gather around a tabletop model of the smallest building at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Murakami has transformed the exterior of the model into a boxy, crazed creature by attaching vinyl banners that depict cartoon-like rolling eyes and pointed teeth--signature images that appear in much of his work.

Strick is enchanted. “That’s fantastic!” he says.

Murakami, who lived for many years in New York City and still keeps a studio there, speaks fairly fluent English. “Fantastic” is definitely in his lexicon, and he is clearly relieved.

The artist, who is also the curator in this instance, is unveiling his ideas for “Superflat”--an exhibition of provocative Japanese work that will open the Museum of Contemporary Art’s newest outpost: the MOCA Gallery at the Pacific Design Center. In a space donated by the center owner Charles Cohen, and with support funds from the same source, the gallery will give the museum a desirable Westside presence. In Strick’s words, it will be devoted to “the full range of MOCA’s programming with an emphasis on architecture and design.”

Which is where “Superflat” comes in. The term is Murakami’s own, his manifesto on the way various forms of graphic design, pop culture and fine arts are compressed--flattened--in Japan. The term also refers to the two-dimensionality of Japanese graphic art and animation, as well as to the shallow emptiness of its consumer culture. Murakami first used it to label an exhibition he organized for the Parco department store museums in Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan. Now an expanded version of that show will inaugurate MOCA’s new venue.

Inside the Quonset hut, Murakami’s visitors huddle closer to the Styrofoam model and peer inside. On the model’s walls, he has placed miniature replicas of dozens of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures in a rough layout of the exhibition. Nineteen artists or collectives will be represented--all pushing the boundaries of their genres, where commercial media meet fine art.

Although “Superflat” will go through a number of changes before plans are complete, Strick and his team are satisfied. “The show suggests the unity of so many of the visual arts,” he says later. “It seemed to exemplify a great deal of what we are attempting to do at the new gallery.”

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Murakami settles into a chair in his studio next to his widely exhibited fiberglass sculpture, “My Lonesome Cowboy,”--a bigger-than-life-sized take on the pug-nosed characters in Japanese animated films--to talk about his evolution and the concept behind “Superflat.”

To Western observers, Murakami’s sculptures, paintings and drawings--and those of many of his compatriots--are something of an homage to Pop artist Andy Warhol. In Murakami’s case, even his working methods are similar. Like the Warhol Factory, Hiropon Factory creates artwork, not to mention toys, T-shirts and publications, via teamwork.

As Murakami speaks, a dozen young Japanese artists monitor developments at computers or do the background work on paintings that he later will finish by hand. His pieces frequently include a “cast list” of his collaborators, and he embraces the techniques of mass production and media manipulation.

In the beginning, Murakami says, he wanted to be an animator in the style of the pioneering Yoshinori Kanada, who is known for his sci-fi animation films from the late 1970s and early 1980s. But Murakami felt his technique to be so weak that he could only qualify for background painting. The best training was thought to be Nihon-ga, the painstaking painting of traditional Japanese subjects, emphasizing outline and flat areas of color. Like Warhol, Murakami is frank about his original motives. “My goal was to make money and build a traditional Japanese house. My parents are from Kyushu and I was raised in Tokyo. My father was a taxi driver and I was poor as a child. I hate the poor life.” Both animators and Nihon-ga artists are handsomely rewarded for their efforts in Japan. His brother Yuji Murakami remains a well-known Nihon-ga practitioner.

From 1986 to 1993, Murakami studied Nihon-ga at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, earning bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. In 1989, he took a trip to New York where he saw Jeff Koons’ erotic sculptures--a distinct contrast to the academic peaches and lotus blossoms he had been learning to render in mineral pigments mixed with glue.

“What’s that?” he recalls thinking. “I had to change my position to understand the contemporary art concepts.”

Back in Japan the following year, he met members of the performance and installation collective Todt and moved for a few months to Brooklyn to work with them. “I was impressed by their lifestyle; it looked so free with all the drinking,” he says. “They were all over 40, but they looked like they were in their 20s. Japanese artists, after 35, wear a jacket and tie and look serious, boring.”

This epiphany, that artists could have fun, led him to change to “a new style of painting.” Abandoning Nihon-ga technique, he retrained himself in acrylic, and got involved with the Japanese subculture known as otaku. Similar to the Western notion of computer geeks, these young people are conversant with the expanding universe of technology. In 1995, Murakami started Hiropon Factory, a conjunction of hiro, the word for hero, and the sound of an explosion, pon, which also means tired. Murakami liked the notion of a tired hero.

By then, he had perfected his own version of superflatness. Murakami bases his painting and sculpture on traditional Japanese themes, especially the celebration of playful, childlike humor. But his images--pastel flowers, figures like “Cowboy,” and those signature teeth and rolling eyes--meld such influences as manga, racy Japanese cartoon books, and anime, Japan’s highly stylized animated films, with traditional Japanese painting and printmaking.

In the catalog for the artist’s 1999 survey at Bard College’s Center of Curatorial Studies Museum in New York, Dana Friis-Hansen writes that Murakami’s work “both reflects upon and slyly interrogates postwar, post-recovery Japanese art and popular culture, voraciously absorbing and engaging both history and culture from Japan and the West.”

His work has found a market in Los Angeles particularly. Among his collectors are high-tech magnate Peter Norton and his wife, Eileen, who sent out a special edition of one of Murakami’s plastic, flower-covered dolls to those lucky enough to be on their 2000 Christmas list.

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Murakami first arrived at the concept of superflat as it pertained to his own art.

“I’d been thinking about the reality of Japanese drawing and painting and how it is different from Western art. What is important in Japanese art is the feeling of flatness. Our culture doesn’t have 3-D,” he says. “Even Nintendo, when it uses 3-D, the Japanese version looks different from the U.S. version. ‘Mortal Combat’ in the U.S comes out as ‘Virtual Fighter’ in Japan and it’s different.”

He had even noticed it back in his art history classes--searching for connections between stylized Nihon-ga painting and the animator Kanada. The link, it turned out, was flatness. He decided that Kanada’s animated sci-fi explosions were simply consecutive design motifs. (A still from Kanada’s 1979 “Galaxy Express 999” is included in the “Superflat” show.)

One notion of flatness led to another--the compression of genres in the pop-inflected work of younger artists. “The new generation doesn’t think about what is art or what is [commercial] illustration,” Murakami explains. “Their work is ‘no genre.’ ”

Murakami points out that the transformation is partly a result of Japan’s long recession. The bubble burst in the early 1990s, creating a generation--Murakami’s--that faced a level of economic uncertainty unknown since the 1950s. Murakami feels that Japan’s long celebration of consumerism has turned to critique. “The Japanese people get fed TV and media for 24 hours a day,” he says. “Now, we have a chance to think, ‘What is my life?’ Consumer culture looks only one direction, not evolved. In the ‘80s, Japanese people didn’t think about the meaning of life because of the strong consumer culture. Now, people are realizing there is an end. They have to think about it more than in the past. Young people are looking outside of consumer culture and asking, ‘What is life?’ ”

Superflat artists, Murakami says, create their own version of popular culture to draw attention to the dominance of media, entertainment and consumption. Significantly, many in the exhibition work in the industries they critique. In addition to fine artists there are commercial photographers, fashion designers, animators, graphic designers and illustrators. Sexual innuendo and black humor are popular topics throughout the show.

Illustrator Chiho Aoshima, known for her depictions of not-so-innocent schoolgirls, is represented by a mural-size digital image, “The Red-Eyed Tribe,” nymph-like women wearing Issey Miyake outfits and walking in a surreal landscape.

Some of the artists work as collectives or under pseudonyms. An installation with shelves and mannequins, resembling their Tokyo store, displays the deconstructivist clothing of fashion designers 20471120, whose name is a reversal of the date in group leader Masahiro Nakagawa’s prediction that “something will happen on Nov. 20, 2047.” The collective stages fashion shows as performance art with audience participation, and also creates clothes from recycled materials.

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One wall in the MOCA show will feature head-shaped sculptures of animals and children by Yoshitomo Nara. Nara, who is essentially a fine artist, had a critically acclaimed survey last year at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. His sculptures of enlarged teacups and paintings of children have a winsome appeal derived from the Japanese celebration of cute or kawai-i, a phenomenon apparent in consumer goods like Hello Kitty. (A separate exhibition of his work is also on view at Blum & Poe in Santa Monica through Feb. 10.)

Manga artist Kentaro Takekuma, in an effort to dissuade Japanese subway commuters from committing suicide on the tracks, did a series of drawings and paintings attaching the face of the English children’s cartoon character Thomas the Tank Engine to the front of a commuter train.

A graphic design firm, groovisions is renowned for its work for the music industry. Groovisions has an extensive sideline of unisex mannequins called Chappies. The life-size figures are installed around Tokyo wearing outfits for sports, work or leisure. The mannequins have spawned a niche in consumer culture. There is Chappie currency, Chappie pachinko machines, Chappie furniture and, most recently, a Chappie techno-saccharine hit single on CD.

Thirty-three Chappies wearing different hairstyles but the same outfits will make an appearance in the MOCA show. In addition, the Chappies decorate the invitation to the “Superflat” gala.

In the exhibition catalog, Murakami sums up many of the concerns of his exhibition. “Initially, ‘Superflat’ was a keyword I used to explain my work,” he writes. “Once I started using it, though, I found that it was applicable to a number of concepts that I had previously been unable to comprehend, including ‘What is free expression?’ ‘What is Japan?’ and ‘What is the nature of this period I live in?’ . . . I would be happy if [‘Superflat’] was even a small step toward clarifying the characteristics of Japanese ‘art’ which have long remained so ambiguous.”

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“Superflat,” MOCA Gallery at Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. Opens today. Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday to 8 p.m. Admission is $3, free on Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m. (213) 626-6222 or https://www.moca.org. Through May 27.