“TAKASHI MURAKAMI : MurakamiZombie” Installation view ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Currently, the Busan Museum of Art is holding a solo exhibition of Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) titled “TAKASHI MURAKAMI : MurakamiZombie” is currently on view. The exhibition was scheduled to run until March 12, but due to the overwhelming support of over 100,000 visitors, the exhibition was postponed by one month to give more citizens the opportunity to see it. The exhibition will run until April 16 next week.
The exhibition is the fourth installment of ‘Lee Ufan and His Friends,’ a large-scale retrospective showcasing more than 170 works, including early works from 1998 that have never been shown to the public, as well as more recent work in a variety of genres, including painting, large-scale sculpture, installation, and video. The exhibition will also feature interactive exhibits through Murakami Augmented Reality (AR).
Takashi Murakami, a master of Japanese contemporary art, has become a world-renowned artist by incorporating the aesthetics of ‘Cuteness’, ‘Grotesqueness’, and ‘Ephemerality’ of manga in Japanese popular culture into his work, along with his ‘Superflat’ theory.
“Grotesqueness is my strength,” he says, and since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, he has been developing a ‘Zombie Aesthetic’ that evolved from one of the aesthetics of his works, bizarreness. Through ‘Zombie Aesthetics,’ which symbolizes the anxiety of contemporary humanity, the artist presents work that break down the boundaries between East and West, high culture and subculture, tradition and modernity.
