Takashi Murakami’s smiling flowers are instantly recognisable; few living artists have emblems as iconic as his and even fewer have become cultural icons in their lifetimes. While multiple interpretations of the flowers exist, the Japanese artist has explained that their meanings are layered. The most prominent explanation is that they resemble hope amid forlorn circumstances; but Murakami conceived his blooms, and much of his work, while thinking about the collective trauma of the Japanese after the Second World War, with particular regard to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The discomfiting feeling evoked by the flower motif is the result of anxiety suppressed under a seemingly cheery surface, emitting a universally resonant existential angst.
Life, death and mortality have been constants throughout Murakami’s prolific career. His new exhibition, Takashi Murakami Mononoke Kyoto, on view at the Higashiyama Cube at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art on the occasion of the institution’s 90th anniversary, and running until September 1, dwells on these themes, as well as on Kyoto itself, where he relocated his family in 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami.
