© Chris Sorenson

Cameras are set up and a team of silent assistants shuffles about, respectfully administering to the needs of the artist. The whole scene at the Gagosian Gallery looks like a carefully choreographed production, which is just what you’d expect from the pop star of the contemporary-art world, Takashi Murakami.

It’s likely that when you hear his name, the first thing that comes to mind are designer handbags and the kitsch, brightly coloured flowers that helped to define an era of contemporary art in the 1990s. Like Andy Warhol, Murakami represents the artist as brand and celebrity; both created a well-oiled mass-marketing machine that blurs the lines between art, commerce, pop, tradition and subculture. In 1996, Murakami also emulated Warhol by founding his own Factory, the Hiropon Factory, rechristened in 2001 as Kaikai Kiki Co.

Born in 1962, Murakami rose to prominence in the ’90s as one of the most prolific and well-known Japanese artists. Coining the term “superflat” to describe his cartoony paintings and also as a comment on changes in Japanese society, Murakami brought the Japanese otaku subculture of manga and anime to the international market, fusing it with Western art influences such as Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Flowers & Skulls, at Gagosian Gallery marked Murakami’s first show in Hong Kong, and the opening night re-enforced how popular his work is in the city. His trademark ponytail has been lopped off, but Murakami is still as recognisable as his brightly coloured creations. He embodies that cartoonish persona, readily posing for the cameras with an arsenal of comical gestures and expressions.

Flower Ball Cosmos 3-D (2008) by Takashi Murakami © Takashi Murakami Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

He’s also an entrepreneur at the head of a very profitable art-making empire of 200 or so people, which works on design collaborations with fashion brands, markets merchandise derived from his art and creates animations. He also runs his own art gallery as part of Kaikai Kiki, which represents artists such as Aya Takano and Anri Sala. All of this on top of an illustrious career as an artist himself, with exhibitions at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Palace of Versailles. Not to mention the collaboration with Louis Vuitton that made him a household name and cemented his brand power globally, across the spheres of both fashion and art.

The otaku culture, long a cornerstone of his work, still plays an important role in it – and the subculture is now embraced by broader Japanese society. “It was a minor element, but now the otaku culture in Japan is quite vibrant,” Murakami says through a translator.

Otaku offered the opportunity to create something distinctly Japanese in a post-war era that still seemed in thrall to Western sensibilities when the artist was coming of age. Although he became the figurehead for this geeky, tech-obsessed subculture, which unashamedly embraced popular culture and video games, Murakami also has a doctorate in the study of traditional Japanese painting, nihonga.

“I grew up in a poor family and wanted to have some skills to earn money, and nihonga art was so valuable that I thought it would be the most efficient way to make money,” he says. “That was the reason I studied it. But I realised that the reason the Japanese art scene was so dead was because there were so many social-structure problems to do with taxation, art distribution and logistics. I learned all this in order to do my business. It was a valuable lesson.”

The artist poses with Of Chinese Lions, Peonies, Skulls, and Fountains (2011); Image courtesy of the Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

Taking up the entire back wall of Gagosian Hong Kong, the piece Of Chinese Lions, Peonies, Skulls, and Fountains (2011) in his current show is impressive in both scale and composition. There are elements of traditional Japanese painting in this landscape, which is made up of a mythical-looking lion atop a rainbow of skulls, with a column of black-ink calligraphy running down one side of the canvas.

The show is dominated by the contrasting symbols of flowers and skulls from which it takes its name. These are motifs that Murakami has drawn on repeatedly and refined over many years; they have become the most famous identifiers of his work. It is “an abstract narrative and structure,” he says, that refers back to the American abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and ’50s. Whole canvases teem with the motif from edge to edge. Enduring symbols of life and death, beauty and decay, happiness and terror, heaven and hell, they are the perfect pairing for Murakami, a master at navigating borders – between East and West, and between new and old.

In 2008, Murakami made Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list, the only visual artist included. Like Jeff Koons, another influence, he has helped redefine notions of art as consumption. He once famously said: “I wanted to be commercially successful. I just wanted to make a living in the ‘entertainment’ world.”

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