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拍品专文
‘Self-portraits are very common in art history, Rembrandt, Warhol… There are many artists making portraits, so I wanted to try, too, to engage with art history: that’s what I’m looking for all the time with my self-portraits’
(T. Murakami interview in Mouse Magazine, 31 July 2014, https://moussemagazine.it/murakami-arhat-palazzo-reale/)
‘With DOB I had created an icon’
(T. Murakami, quoted in Murakami: Ego, New York 2012, p. 18).
With an impassive stare, raised eyebrows and hand on hip, Takashi Murakami stands atop a dense mound of multi-coloured skulls, flanked by his iconic alter-ego and long-standing sidekick DOB. Simultaneously a self-portrait and a modern-day vanitas, DOB & Me: On the Red Mound of the Dead conflates two grand art-historical traditions within the psychedelic vibrancy of Murakami’s unique visual language. Exquisitely rendered with almost scientific precision, the work demonstrates the characteristic flatness and electric neon colours of Murakami’s celebrated ‘Superflat’ aesthetic. Combining the glossy visual language of commercial graphic design, as well as traditional Japanese planar art forms, with otherworldly anime or manga characters, Superflat references the fetishist language of Pop Art, only to invert its meaning with resources from Japanese culture. Laced with the dark undertones of a memento mori yet pulsating with exuberant energy, DOB & Me: On the Red Mound of the Dead merges high and low culture, Eastern and Western traditions, to create a powerful expression of artistic identity.
DOB is the earliest cartoon avatar in Murakami’s pantheon of recurring motifs, and was born in 1993 from a late-night word game with friends. Coming into existence as a visual pun, his name derived from the tag line, ‘Dobojite? dobojite?’ (‘Why? Why?’) popularized by Japanese comedian, Yuri Toru. Murakami visualized this dada-ist phrase by creating an amorphous, fantastical character that takes as its referent, imaginary popular culture icons such the anime and manga figures Doraemon, Sonic the Hedgehog and Disney’s Mickey Mouse. As he explained, ‘I realized that by lining up totally unrelated words – to be specific, the phrase dobozite, dobozite oshamanbe – you could make a “Jenny Holzer-style” art … In the beginning then, Mr. DOB did not arise as a character, but simply as a figure with two ears (the left one showing the letter D, the right one the letter B, and the face forming an O), DOB being the abbreviation of the joke I just mentioned’ (T. Murakami, quoted in ‘Interview with Takashi Murakami by Helen Kelmachter’, in Kaikai Ki, exh. cat., Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2002, p. 75). DOB has since undergone various transformations in the form of paintings, inflatables, collectibles and sculptures – a fleeting life-form encapsulating the endless desire for consumption. As the artist asserts, ‘[With DOB] I had created an icon’ (T. Murakami, quoted in Murakami: Ego, New York 2012, p. 18).
Influenced by Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, Murakami’s Superflat aesthetic plumbs historical, popular and commercial imagery and to playfully explore the superficial nature of globalized consumer culture. Following the Second World War, Japan underwent a cultural invasion with American imports. For many, old values, old styles and old subjects were either effaced or reinvented to reflect this tide of Western culture. Even Japan’s famed animations have their roots in this cultural exchange, representing an adaptation of the Disney programming that was filling the airwaves and movie screens. Coming of age in post Fukushima Japan, Murakami’s art responds to his country’s changing sense of national identity, skilfully conflating Western and Japanese motifs to form an entirely new – yet simultaneously familiar – aesthetic. In DOB & Me: On the Red Mound of the Dead, the artist emerges as triumphant: a modern-day superhero standing on the brink of a new future.
(T. Murakami interview in Mouse Magazine, 31 July 2014, https://moussemagazine.it/murakami-arhat-palazzo-reale/)
‘With DOB I had created an icon’
(T. Murakami, quoted in Murakami: Ego, New York 2012, p. 18).
With an impassive stare, raised eyebrows and hand on hip, Takashi Murakami stands atop a dense mound of multi-coloured skulls, flanked by his iconic alter-ego and long-standing sidekick DOB. Simultaneously a self-portrait and a modern-day vanitas, DOB & Me: On the Red Mound of the Dead conflates two grand art-historical traditions within the psychedelic vibrancy of Murakami’s unique visual language. Exquisitely rendered with almost scientific precision, the work demonstrates the characteristic flatness and electric neon colours of Murakami’s celebrated ‘Superflat’ aesthetic. Combining the glossy visual language of commercial graphic design, as well as traditional Japanese planar art forms, with otherworldly anime or manga characters, Superflat references the fetishist language of Pop Art, only to invert its meaning with resources from Japanese culture. Laced with the dark undertones of a memento mori yet pulsating with exuberant energy, DOB & Me: On the Red Mound of the Dead merges high and low culture, Eastern and Western traditions, to create a powerful expression of artistic identity.
DOB is the earliest cartoon avatar in Murakami’s pantheon of recurring motifs, and was born in 1993 from a late-night word game with friends. Coming into existence as a visual pun, his name derived from the tag line, ‘Dobojite? dobojite?’ (‘Why? Why?’) popularized by Japanese comedian, Yuri Toru. Murakami visualized this dada-ist phrase by creating an amorphous, fantastical character that takes as its referent, imaginary popular culture icons such the anime and manga figures Doraemon, Sonic the Hedgehog and Disney’s Mickey Mouse. As he explained, ‘I realized that by lining up totally unrelated words – to be specific, the phrase dobozite, dobozite oshamanbe – you could make a “Jenny Holzer-style” art … In the beginning then, Mr. DOB did not arise as a character, but simply as a figure with two ears (the left one showing the letter D, the right one the letter B, and the face forming an O), DOB being the abbreviation of the joke I just mentioned’ (T. Murakami, quoted in ‘Interview with Takashi Murakami by Helen Kelmachter’, in Kaikai Ki, exh. cat., Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2002, p. 75). DOB has since undergone various transformations in the form of paintings, inflatables, collectibles and sculptures – a fleeting life-form encapsulating the endless desire for consumption. As the artist asserts, ‘[With DOB] I had created an icon’ (T. Murakami, quoted in Murakami: Ego, New York 2012, p. 18).
Influenced by Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, Murakami’s Superflat aesthetic plumbs historical, popular and commercial imagery and to playfully explore the superficial nature of globalized consumer culture. Following the Second World War, Japan underwent a cultural invasion with American imports. For many, old values, old styles and old subjects were either effaced or reinvented to reflect this tide of Western culture. Even Japan’s famed animations have their roots in this cultural exchange, representing an adaptation of the Disney programming that was filling the airwaves and movie screens. Coming of age in post Fukushima Japan, Murakami’s art responds to his country’s changing sense of national identity, skilfully conflating Western and Japanese motifs to form an entirely new – yet simultaneously familiar – aesthetic. In DOB & Me: On the Red Mound of the Dead, the artist emerges as triumphant: a modern-day superhero standing on the brink of a new future.