Art walk in Hong Kong: TAKASHI MURAKAMI Flowers & Skulls Exhibition

Immersing in The TAKASHI MURAKAMI Flowers & Skulls Exhibition in Gagosian Gallery is pleasure experience to me. This is the first Takashi Murakami's exhibition in Hong Kong. Flowers with different expressions and colorful skulls fills the gallery. We, as audiences, can experience a visit with "joy and terror" at the same time.

Takashi Murakami is a famous but controversial artist in international arena. He announces a "superflat" style to represent the traditional Japanese aesthetic characteristics and the post-war Japanese culture and society. Takashi further studies the subculture in Japanese society like manga, pop culture, as the topics of his work. Through his works, we can see his efforts to bridge the Japanese culture to the western art history and to express individual thought about the defeated culture of post war Japan.

In the exhibition, two distinctive iconic subjects, flowers and skulls constructs a space of "joy and terror. This is the attempt that Takashi to explore the central dichotomies in his art. [1] At the first impression, Takashi's work is full of childishness and psychodelic as the outline of the paintings are manga style and colorful. Flowers with smiling face are lovely and skulls are not horrible since they are painted in bright and vivid color. However, if we engage into the atmosphere, we may have a deeper and strong sensation of the paintings. In the common cognitive frame, flowers represent bliss, peace and full of vitality. On the contrary, skulls give the impression of horror and death. Reading through the paintings, I feel confused about the already conceived meanings of these two objects. The bright smiling flowers seem not to be a smile through heart. Just like wearing a mask to hide the real emotion. From a video that interview with Takashi, he said that flowers with a large variety of color shows a complex of emotion, not simply the original and positive emotion [2]. Skulls, on the other hand, are presented in some bright and warm color. The sense of horror of skulls vanished. The intersection of feelings during walking around the gallery is an interesting experience.

Left: Flower Ball Cosmos, 2008 Right: Flowerball Black, 2007

Blue flower & Skulls, 2012

Takashi is famous for his "superflat" style, combining the western and Japanese culture in art through his two dimension and manga style works. However, there are proportion of critics to his work as lacking technique and structure in his home country. This exhibition, he is determined to show his painting, composition technique in his work. Although the majority composition is the complex cluster still, he manages to combine the painstaking traditional artisanal techniques (such as Ukiyo-e) with the pop and fizz of manga in some of the exhibits[1]. The largest painting: Of Chinese Lions Peonies, Skulls, And Fountains, 2011, is the best illusion for his techniques. It is experimental to integrate such two subjects that diametrically opposed to each other in one painting. Besides, he try to structure the theme of the exhibition as a conflict but mutually accepting each other. As mentioned above the meaning of flowers and skulls are conflictual on one side. However, they can be mutually accepting each other on the other side as the two subjects also have similar characteristics, the fragile vibrancy of life and the passing of time [1]. He structures a contrasting but balanced exhibition successfully. Having a visit to Takashi's Flowers & Skulls world is a fun and great opportunity to enrich my art experience.