Kaikai Kiki

Academic background and early career

Murakami was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. From early on, he was a fan of anime and manga (Japanese animation and comics respectively), and hoped to work in the animation industry. He attended Tokyo University of the Arts to acquire the drafting skills necessary to become an animator, but eventually majored in Nihonga, the 'traditional' style of Japanese painting that incorporates traditional Japanese artistic conventions, techniques and subjects. He earned his master's degree in 1988. Though he would go on to earn a Ph.D. in Nihonga (1993), he gradually became disillusioned with its insular, highly political world and started to explore more contemporary artistic styles, media, and strategies.

Murakami was dissatisfied with the state of contemporary art in Japan, believing it to be "a deep appropriation of Western trends." Thus, much of his early work was done in the spirit of social criticism and satire. On an article naming and explaining all of Murakami's pieces lies the infamous My Lonesome Cowboy, a companion to his earlier Hiropon. The sculpture is that of a naked anime character with blond spiky hair with a spiral trail of semen circling him. This piece is Murakami's most expensive piece to date selling for $15,100,000 at Sotheby's New York auction in 2008. Efforts from this period include performance art (Osaka Mixer Project, 1992), parodies of the "message" art popular in Japan in the early '90s, (Dobozite Dobozite Oshamanbe, 1993), and conceptual works (e.g. Randoseru Project, 1991). He also began developing his own pop icon, "Mr. DOB", which would later develop into a form of self-portraiture, the first of several endlessly morphing and recurring motifs seen throughout his work. Though he garnered attention, many of his early pieces were not initially well received in Japan.

2007–present

From 2007 to 2009, Murakami's first retrospective ©Murakami traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles (its multi-disciplinary approach to contemporary art), to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and lastly the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain. Sarah Thornton tracks the early stages of the exhibition's planning, including in-depth curatorial meetings between Murakami and prominent museum figures, in Seven Days in the Art World. The exhibition earned widespread attention for, among other things, including a fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique as one of the exhibits.

In 2008, Murakami was named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People", the only visual artist included.

In September 2010 Murakami became the third contemporary artist, and first Japanese, to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles in France, filling 15 rooms and the park with his sculptures, paintings, a decorative carpet, and lamps.

On June 21, 2011, Google featured a doodle tagged as "First Day of Summer" which was created by Murakami. This was accompanied by a Winter Solstice doodle for the Southern Hemisphere.

In February 2012, Murakami opened an exhibition in Doha, Qatar. Titled Murakami-Ego, this showed around 60 old works alongside new ones designed especially for the exhibition. Among the new ones, a 100-metre long wall painting depicting the suffering of the Japanese people after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In March 2013, livetune released a PV, directed by Murakami, for Redial, featuring Hatsune Miku.

Factory

In 1996, Murakami launched the Hiropon Factory, his production workshop, in order to work on a larger scale and in a more diverse array of media. His model inherits the atelier system which has long existed in Japanese painting, printmaking and sculpture and is common to anime and manga enterprises, such as Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli. In 2001, Hiropon Factory was incorporated as Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.

Market value

On November 11, 2003, ARTnews described Murakami's work as being in great demand. Hiropon (1997), satirical sculpture, standing a bit over 7 feet tall, of an anime character with oversized lactating breasts whose milk stream forms a jump rope made of fiberglass, sold for $427,500 at Christie's auction house in May 2002. Miss ko2 (1996), a 6-foot-tall model of an anime-inspired blonde girl in a red and white maid outfit, was sold for $567,500 in 2003, and was put up for auction in 2010, where it sold for 22.9 million HKD. In May 2008, My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), an anime-inspired sculpture of a masturbating boy whose semen stream forms a lasso, sold for $15.2 million at Sotheby's, making it his most highly valued piece. As of 2020, Murakami's net-worth is estimated to be around US$100 million, and the value of his works continue to rise.