Seven Days in the Art World (21 page)

Murakami is unusual among artists in acknowledging the collective labor inscribed in his work. For example, with
Tan Tan Bo
(2001), a three-panel painting of the ever-mutating DOB character, which MOCA is using for its magazine advertisements (in this work, DOB looks like a saucer-eyed intergalactic spaceship), the names of the twenty-five people who worked on the piece are written on the back of the canvas. Other paintings credit upwards of thirty-five names. Similarly, Murakami’s desire to help his assistants launch their own careers is unusual. Many artists loathe losing good help and, more important, the
appearance
of creative isolation is central to their credibility.

After a
few hours at the Saitama painting studio, two PR women, my interpreter, and I piled into a seven-seater Toyota chauffeured by one of the nonpainting assistants, a cool dude in a fedora and vintage fifties glasses, to go to the site of Murakami’s original studio, which he set up with three assistants in 1995. Initially called the Hiropon Factory, in homage to Warhol’s Factory and his manufacturing model of art production, it was renamed Kaikai Kiki in 2002, when Murakami reconceptualized his entire operation along the lines of a marketing and communications company. While the Sega Corporation has Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo has Super Mario, Kaikai Kiki was named after the mascots that appear on its letterhead and cultural goods. Kaikai is an anodyne white bunny, while Kiki is a wild three-eyed pink mouse with fangs. Both characters have four ears each, a “human” pair and an “animal” pair, suggesting that the company is all ears.

Our fifteen-minute journey, which passed modest but respectable homes with bushes pruned like bonsais, ended on a gravel driveway surrounded by a handful of dismal prefabricated buildings, self-seeded trees, and weeds. In addition to providing two workspaces, the location plays host to Murakami’s archive, two greenhouses containing his cactus collection, and a grand platform of pink lotuses in waist-high ceramic planters. The lotuses were so out of keeping with their humble environment that they looked as if they’d just landed there.

In the first airless building, three studio assistants listened to a Japanese pop-rock radio station, JWAVE, as they prepared to paint a smaller-than-life-sized fiberglass sculpture entitled the
Second Mission Project Ko
(often called
SMPKo
²
), a three-part work in which Miss Ko, a manga fantasy of a girl with big eyes and breasts, a tiny pointed nose, and a flat, aerodynamic belly, metamorphoses into a flying jet. The work is in an edition of three with two artist’s proofs (called APs). The first three editions had already been sold; this first AP needed to be finished in time for the MOCA show. Miss Ko’s head, hair, torso, legs, and labia were laid out separately on what looked like two operating tables. At one table, two women were cutting tape into precise shapes to cover her for spray-painting. In another part of the small room, a man was testing different shades of white for a Bride of Frankenstein–style lightning streak in her hair. Against her Barbie-pink skin, he examined swatches of creamy white, gray-white, blinding fluorescent white, and a fourth white that lay in between. He chose the two he thought worked best and said, “Murakami-san makes the final decision.” When I asked what he thought of Miss Ko’s looks, he said, “She is a masterpiece of media-world beauty, but she’s not what I want personally in a woman.”

Murakami’s editions are differentiated not only by number but by color. The first sculpture of an edition might contain three hundred colors, while the third might feature as many as nine hundred. Murakami complicates, tweaks, and perfects the works as he goes along, playing with pigment not just as an aesthetic category but as a racial one. Some sculptures and paintings come in albino, Caucasian peach, olive brown, and jet-black versions. Later, Murakami would tell me that he thinks of Japanese skin color as “plum.”

In the next building we politely removed our shoes, only to barge in on seven women eating rice dishes out of Tupperware containers. The Kaikai Kiki merchandise staff members were having their daily communal lunch. I was told they’d set up a temporary merchandise showroom elsewhere, so we walked across the gravel to another cardboard box of a building, where I found Mika Yoshitake, Paul Schimmel’s assistant for the MOCA show, shuffling in slippers through a sea of T-shirts, posters, postcards, pillows, plastic figurines, stickers, stuffed monsters, mugs, mouse pads, key chains, catalogues, cell-phone covers, badges, tote bags, handkerchiefs, decorative tins, notepads, and pencils. To one side, next to its original white pyramid packaging, was a notable gem—a ten-inch-high plastic sculpture called
Mister Wink, Cosmos Ball
. Perhaps owing to his computer-universe sensibilities, Peter Norton (of Norton Utilities) was an early adopter of Murakami’s work, and back in 2000, he and his then wife, Eileen, commissioned an edition of five thousand
Mister Wink
s to send to friends and business acquaintances as Christmas presents. This clowny egghead character sitting in a sloppy lotus position with upturned palms was the first incarnation of
Oval
.

“We’re going to have a room in the exhibition devoted to merchandise,” said Yoshitake with a mildly pained expression. “Paul wants nothing to do with the details. I’m choosing which three hundred items get shipped to L.A.” Yoshitake grew up in California and has Japanese parents. She was working on a PhD on Japanese conceptual and process art at the University of California at Los Angeles when she was poached by the museum. (Later Schimmel would tell me, “Among the art historians at UCLA, I’m like the Antichrist. I lure their best students to the dark side!”) With her art-historical knowledge and language skills, Yoshitake became an essential link between MOCA and Kaikai Kiki. “Initially, I didn’t much like Takashi’s work,” she told me. “I’m interested in ephemerality and entropy in art. I’m not a big ‘object person.’ But Takashi’s art has grown on me.” Yoshitake held a clipboard in one hand and played with her bead necklace with the other. “I’ve come to love the DOB character,” she continued. “Especially when he is on a self-destructive rampage of consumption and excess.” Yoshitake had revised her opinion about pop artists. “I used to assume that they didn’t have anything substantial to offer and that their main goal was to surround themselves with fame and fortune,” she said. “But Takashi’s got bigger ambitions. His works are not just superficial icons. His use of parody and nonsense give a critical edge to all that spectacle and branding.”

After a noodle lunch, we headed to Murakami’s slick headquarters in a three-story office block in Motoazabu. It was at least an hour’s drive, past more rice paddies and light industrial facilities, over a major river and along an elevated highway engulfed in soundproof fencing to the plush neighborhood, not far from the designer stores of Roppongi Hills. Once there, we ascended to the studio in an elevator. When the doors drew apart, we faced a stainless steel and glass door for which a fingerprint scan and a four-digit PIN number were required. Once we were across the threshold, the swath of bare white walls and well-sanded wood floors initially evoked a gallery back room, but on closer inspection it was clearly a high-security digital design lab. The second floor housed two boardrooms and two open-plan office areas. The third floor was architecturally much like the second, except that’s where the real creative work was being done. While on my quick tour, I caught a tantalizing glimpse of a 3-D computer rendering of
Oval Buddha
rotating on a pedestal, but before I could get a good look I was whisked away by the PR woman.

Murakami roamed the third floor barefoot, evidently happier than he’d been that morning, swiftly answering questions from his staff. His workstation, a sixteen-foot-long table, was situated in the center of a large room, surrounded by his team of four designers and five animators, all of whom sat with their backs to him, their gazes purposefully directed at their white-rimmed twenty-inch screens. At the hub of his table was a Mac laptop around which were scattered stacks of blank CDs, art magazines and auction catalogues, empty takeout coffee cups, and a box of mini-KitKats. On a counter at the end of the room, a triptych of face clocks told the time in Tokyo, New York, and L.A. Above them were three full-sized color printouts of the flower triptych I’d seen in progress at the painting studio.

Had Murakami been sitting in his swivel chair, Chiho Aoshima would have been sitting within reach of his right hand. Although her location would suggest that she was working on one of Murakami’s projects, Aoshima was actually putting the final touches on a picture for an upcoming show of her own work in Paris. Aoshima used to run Murakami’s design department, but the thirty-three-year-old artist quit to devote herself full-time to her own art. Unlike Warhol’s Factory, where, in the words of the art historian Caroline A. Jones, women were “expected to work hard for no pay, suffer beautifully, and tell all,” six of the seven artists whose independent careers are promoted by Kaikai Kiki are female.

At the appointed time, Murakami settled into his swivel chair in a half-lotus position, one leg up, the other dangling, ready for a conversation. He offered me green tea and apologized for his English, admitting that even in Japanese, he had “no power to communicate in words. That is why I twist to the painting.” Nevertheless, he believes in the influence of media coverage and acknowledges that the studio visit is an important art world ritual for promoting art. Murakami told me that he was working on thirty or forty different projects that day. “My weak point—I cannot focus on just one thing. I have to set up many things. If just looking at one project, then immediately get the feeling it boring.” At the end of last year, Murakami was so exhausted that he spent ten days in the hospital. “That was very stressful. I bring my computer. Many assistants come to my room. Finally doctor said too much crowd, waste of money, you must go home.”

What kind of a boss are you? I asked.

“I am a very bad president,” Murakami responded without hesitation. “I have low technique for driving the company. I don’t really want to work in a company, but I have big desire for making many pieces. Operating the people and working on art are completely different. Every morning, I upset people,” admitted the unrelenting aesthetic micromanager. “I used to think that my staff were motivated by money, but the most important thing for creative people is the sense that they are learning. It’s like video game. They have frustration with my high expectations, so when they get my ‘yes’ for their work, they feel like they’ve won a level.” He stroked his goatee. “I’m thinking a lot about how to connect with people who are under thirty in Japan. I have to communicate with a video game feeling.”

Murakami had pulled the elastic band out of his hair and put it around his wrist while he was talking; his hippie mane now hung down his chest. “At the design stage, I think they do input their ideas,” he said. Murakami’s work starts as a paintbrush drawing on paper, which his assistants then scan into the computer using the live-trace tool of Adobe Illustrator CS2, then they fine-tune the curves and zigzags with different techniques. “I don’t know how to operate Illustrator, but I will say ‘yes, yes, yes, no, no, no’ when I check the work,” he said. Vector art software like Illustrator, which allows the user to stretch, contort, and scale up images without any degradation, has transformed the design industry, but relatively few fine artists use it. Photoshop, which is used by artists such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, has revolutionized contemporary photography, but the bulk of painting and sculpture production remains doggedly low-tech. At Kaikai Kiki, the artwork’s design goes back and forth between Murakami and his computer-literate assistants until he is satisfied with the picture. By the time the design is sent to the painting studio for execution, there is little room for interpretation, except perhaps in the process of turning digital colors into real-world paint mixes.

The situation is not quite as straightforward with sculpture, where the transition to an object with actual length, width, and depth requires substantially more intermediate analysis and clarification. For
Oval
, Murakami’s first metal sculpture, the artist used his regular fiberglass fabricating company, Lucky Wide, to make variously scaled models, then a foundry called Kurotani Bijutsu (
bijutsu
means “art”) to cast and assemble the piece. Murakami told me that the production of
Oval
was initially so strained that many sculptors quit, and one even had a stroke. “This piece have the grudge of those sculptors,” he explained. “
Oval
is haunted with a very dark energy. It is part of its success. Probably you can experience that feeling when you see it.

“An artist is a necromancer,” said Murakami. Even with the translation support of almost all the bilingual people in the room, the statement was cryptic. A dark wizard? A high priest? Someone who can talk to the dead? Murakami’s work bears witness to his many years as an
otaku
science-fiction geek and obsessive manga fan. In Japan, these geeks have a reputation for being socially dysfunctional, sexually frustrated young men who live in a fantasy world. As Murakami explained, “We define
subculture
as a cool culture from abroad, but
otaku
is an uncool indigenous culture. My mentality came from those animation geeks. I idled my time, imagining that Japan was a Philip K. Dick world.” Murakami absentmindedly put his hair back up in a slightly cock-eyed bun. “An artist is someone who understands the border between this world and that one,” he continued. “Or someone who makes an effort to know it.” Certainly Murakami’s work sits between many universes—art and cartoon, yin and yang, Jekyll and Hyde—but nowadays the artist is by no means an aimless dreamer. “I change my direction or continue in same direction by seeing people’s reaction,” he admitted. “My concentration is how to survive long-term and how to join with the contemporary feeling. To focus on nothing besides profit is, by my values, evil. But I work by trial and error to be popular.”