Takashi Murakami

Hong Kong

What is art? Tokyo-born artist, Takashi Murakami, says: „For those of us born in Asia, it remains an ever important question. The reason is that what we today define as Art represents the path followed by Western art history and yet here in the East, we have our own history. To survive as artists, we must learn to resolve the collision of these two cultures.My own personal position is drawn from how well I can arrange the unique flowers of Asia, moreover the ever strange blossoms that have bloomed in the madness of the defeated culture of postwar Japan, into work that will live within the confines of Western art history.“

His current exhibition Flowers & Skulls, explores one of the central dichotomies of his art—between joy and terror, his optimistic magnanimity as an artist and his pessimistic perspective on postwar Japan. Here, this dichotomy is symbolized by the stark contrast of bright smiling flowers and disturbing, menacing representations of skulls. Whether depicted as single iconic „portraits“ or in complex clusters of virtuoso composition and paintwork that combine painstaking traditional artisanal techniques with the pop and fizz of manga, the flower and the skull stand as eternal motifs in the history of art and popular culture. Both oppositional and parallel, they are reminders of the fragile vibrancy of life and the inexorable passing of time.

Takashi Murakami

Gagosian Gallery

November 29th, 2012 – February 9th, 2013
7/F Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central, Hong Kong
China

Calendar