SUPERFLAT WORLD

IT’S the tuft of hair on the chin, the relief of a goatee on the smooth aluminum surface of the face, that gives the character’s identity away.

Otherwise, the 17-foot-high statue of a big-eyed “Oval Buddha” could be just another of Takashi Murakami’s cute creations: a wandering space alien, perhaps, or a member of a tribe of ghosts. The character sits like Humpty Dumpty on the lip of a flower vase, his oversized head far too big for his tiny torso. He has a potbelly. His spine sags. He is asleep.

He is Murakami.

“Over the years, as I worked on it, it became a self-portrait,” says Murakami, the 45-year-old Pop art innovator who will unveil the statue at the retrospective of his works called “Copyright Murakami,” opening Monday at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Sitting in the minimalist boardroom of his Tokyo office, with not a painting or a splotch of color on its white walls, he says the figure borrows inspiration from the darker creations of legendary Japanese cartoonist Shigeru Mizuki. The character has two faces: one facing forward with eyes shut; another on the back of his head that is baring fangs but may be emitting nothing more threatening than a yawn.

“It says I’m getting old and fat and have a big head,” he says, a laugh seeming to explode from his belly. “No sports; just sitting every day. A very tired back. Those are the feelings that went into this.

“He’s a very honest character,” Murakami says.

“Oval Buddha” is Murakami’s newest addition to his cast of creatures, an attempt to create another Pop art icon, and one of the few new works among the more than 90 that make up the MOCA exhibition. Five years in the making from conception to creation, the Oval character came to Murakami as he sat on the toilet. (“Sad, isn’t it? I wish it was a more beautiful story,” he says without a hint of sheepishness.)

The retrospective also comes six years after the 2001 MOCA show that Murakami curated and which loudly announced his Superflat theory of Japanese art to a Western audience. Murakami’s big idea was to see postwar anime and manga as the progeny of the 17th and 18th century Edo era’s two-dimensional artistic techniques. He merged those flat patterns with modern decoration to create a specifically Japanese postmodern aesthetic.

The resulting canon -- with gravity-defying sculptures of bazooka-breasted women, cuddly figurines, abstract paintings of mushrooms, digital animation and, oh yes, his famous Louis Vuitton accessories -- has become highly coveted by contemporary art collectors and speculators. The Murakami brand now commands some of the highest of those unearthly prices being fetched in the frenzied bazaar that is the contemporary art market.

Murakami has never been shy about moving merchandise, and the volume is sustained by a cadre of artists at his company, Kaikai Kiki. But he remains a controversial figure in Japan. The idea of producing fine art as a collective project offended Japan’s insular art establishment. And there were plenty of cries of “sellout” in 2003 when Murakami took up Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs’ offer to splash some colorful Superflat flowers and decoration onto the company’s famously brown bags.

But Murakami has been single-minded about seeing art as an enterprise. His most recent book is called “The Theory of Art Entrepreneurship.” He’s the artist as CEO.

A compelling tale

MOCA curator Paul Schimmel says collectors have provided MOCA with all the pieces needed to present Murakami’s story-so-far. It is a compelling tale: A classically trained doctoral art history student at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music rebels at the suffocating Western influence on Japanese culture. Murakami taps into contemporary Japan’s otaku culture of “geeks,” hard-core fans of anime and manga whose obsession with detail, affection for infantile objects and sexual fetishes have since moved from the fringe of Japanese society in the 1970s to become a mass commercial movement.

“The show is simply Takashi’s oeuvre,” Schimmel said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, “from the most important paintings and sculptures to the commercial collectibles.”

Murakami’s art speaks to the sensibilities of the generation born in the 1960s, those who grew up with the reverberations of World War II’s disaster pulsing through the culture. They were raised on a media diet of anime and manga, with their anti-technology, antiwar story lines and themes. And they came of age in an era when Japan could throw up little more than Marxist jargon in resistance to the deluge of imported American culture.

The inevitable question posed by a retrospective, however, is whether there still is life in Superflat. Does the style speak to the Japanese of the digital age, a generation largely ignorant about the cultural upheavals of the postwar period and that has economic anxieties unknown back then? Or is it a movement whose time is passing?

Schimmel, an early Murakami booster, argues that the artist is now working at the peak of his powers, “producing works of complexity and richness.” But “Copyright Murakami” includes just a smattering of new stuff: reworked versions of old favorites like the space alien Mr. Pointy (no word on what French billionaire Francois Pinault, who paid $1.5 million for a 23-foot-high Mr. Pointy statue in 2003, thinks of that), and two animated short films -- a 10-minute clip of what Murakami says will eventually be a full-length animation film and the video he produced along with the album art for Kanye West’s “Graduation” CD.

All this raises questions about where Murakami is heading. More than a few eyebrows were cocked in Japan at his decision in 2005 to do album art and a nostalgia-tinged video for a greatest hits collection by the Japanese folk band Yuzu, a middle-of-the-road duo.

Others wonder why he is devoting so much energy and money into making an anime film at a time when its edgiest creative days are believed to be behind it and many see it as atrophied and calcified -- like rock ‘n’ roll or, as some now argue, hip-hop. Anime may still be cool in the West, but young, creative Japanese are much more likely to be enticed to become video game designers than drawn to the prospect of working in one of the anime industry’s drawing sweatshops. As media become more portable and disposable (music is just something you download to your cellphone and dump three days later), art forms like anime can appear increasingly quaint. Something to amuse 45-year-olds.

Questions of commercialism

EVEN in the West there are signs of a developing backlash over Murakami’s relentless merchandising. Some critics believe Murakami has succumbed to a worship of commercialism, sacrificing quality to churn out product -- all those T-shirts and mugs adorned with his cute characters -- at a rate that would make his spiritual mentor Andy Warhol blush. His show last spring at New York’s Gagosian artplex took a couple of sharp critical slaps that accused him of cashing in, though it didn’t dent sales. Murakami responds that the fuss over prices was “a compliment to me -- I knew it would be a shopping mall.”

But the “Copyright Murakami” show offers critics an even bigger bulls-eye: the presence of a fully operational Louis Vuitton store in the exhibition itself. Both Schimmel and Murakami claim the idea as their own. (“That’s Takashi being provocative,” laughs Schimmel who, to prove ownership, can tell a detailed version of how he took the in-museum Vuitton store from concept to reality.)

Murakami says the presence of the store expresses his core belief in blurring the lines between art and commerce, noting how Japanese department stores have traditionally been prime venues for art shows. Yet while a fusion project between a fine artist and Vuitton might not be scandalous in Tokyo or Osaka, Murakami was well aware it would be controversial in L.A. “I never thought Paul would get away with it,” he says. Schimmel argues that an operating Vuitton store was simply the most appropriate way to display the artist’s commercial work and says he’s braced for a “firestorm” of criticism, sounding like he’d be crushed if it didn’t happen.

“There will be some harsh reviews; I would be absolutely shocked if there were not,” says Schimmel.

Critics only pull out the elephant gun for elephantine targets, but success has made Murakami just that. Superflat got a lot of attention for promoting the notion that there are no boundaries between low and high art (it contends that low art is high art). But Superflat was also hijacked by cultural critics who tried to turn it into an all-encompassing theory purporting to “explain” postmodern Japan to the West. Superflat was even heralded as the postmodern future that awaits us all. Once we reject the grand organizing theories that animate the West -- religion, Marxism, imperialism and their fellow travelers -- we can replace them with simple aesthetics, taking pleasure in small details of daily life, like an otaku.

The inflation of Superflat has been a burden to Murakami, sympathetic critics say, though they also suggest he is prone to making comments that fuel the hype. There is, cautions architect Jun Aoki, one of Murakami’s friends, “some difference between what Murakami is saying and what he is doing.”

“I don’t necessarily accept Takashi’s conceptual approach to his own art,” Schimmel says. “Is there some validity to Superflat? Absolutely. But one-word theories tend to -- sorry -- flatten ideas.” Murakami, he says, “can be awfully manipulative with Western audiences.”

Aoki, one of Japan’s most innovative architects, describes Murakami as the latest Japanese artist to be embraced by the West for providing it with an easy-to-understand packaging of Japanese exoticism. “Superflat is a simple strategy for the international art world,” says Aoki, who is a contemporary and shares a Louis Vuitton connection (the architect has designed five Louis Vuitton boutiques in Japan). “It’s a sort of Orientalism used to describe Japanese culture to the world.”

Other critics argue that the postwar cultural upheavals that shaped the Superflat style have little relevance to the emerging generation of Japanese contemporary artists.

“Superflat was very specific to Murakami’s generation, but it only explains part of the development of Japan’s postwar culture,” says prominent Japanese art critic Midori Matsui. “It’s not an almighty recipe for understanding contemporary culture. And no way is it a script for the future.”

Generational differences

Some of the underlying conditions that bequeathed Superflat are gone, observers say. For one thing, the trauma of Hiroshima that animated the early anime and manga culture has little resonance among modern Japanese youth. Schimmel describes how Murakami’s mother constantly reminded her son how she was spared death as a child only because cloud cover over her home city of Kokura diverted the American bomber with its atomic payload to its secondary target of Nagasaki. “I didn’t go 10 days without hearing about the war when I was young,” Murakami said last week. But younger Japanese, he added, “now almost never hear about it.”

And the American cultural icons that once inspired either revulsion or longing have long since been absorbed into the Japanese cultural DNA.

“Murakami’s generation grew up with all that postwar American imagery where hamburgers were still seen as exotic Americana,” says Roland Kelts, the author of “JapanAmerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.” “But I have spoken to school kids in Osaka who insist that McDonald’s -- McDo, they call it -- is a Japanese chain. It’s all become part of the pop miasma.”

There is, says Aoki, “a very, very deep generation gap in Japan.”

Yet few are about to write Murakami off as irrelevant. Certainly not while billionaires are still buying his stuff and American superstars like Kanye West are clamoring to work with him.

“Takashi always sees opportunities to transform himself, to mutate in the process of collaborating with strong personalities like Kanye, Jacobs and myself,” says Schimmel, who sees Murakami as still willing to take risks with his career. “He adjusts himself to art culture, to corporate culture, to music culture.”

And art critic Matsui sees life in Superflat yet. She describes the “Oval” statue as “wonderful,” declaring that “it shows the potential of Superflat: a three-dimensional realization of a two-dimensional drawing. It’s a breach of the Western idea of sculpture. It’s radical. It’s Superflat.”

Murakami sure doesn’t look worried -- though he shakes his head at the cost of making his animated film. He’s preoccupied too with the live-action movie he’s producing, due out next year, about Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who brought Zen Buddhism to Japan.

“I think the Zen concept and the Superflat concept are really similar,” Murakami explains. “They don’t react with the real world. They don’t have sadness or happiness. Zen and Superflat fit.

“That’s my new discovery,” he says. “The new concept is: back to history.”

bruce.wallace@latimes.com

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‘Copyright Murakami’

Where: The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N. Central Ave.,

Los Angeles

When: Monday to Feb. 11

Price: Free to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222 or www.moca.org