Devotees of Murakami’s work are well acquainted with its source material — manga story boarding, anime, and Otaku, the subcultural phenomenon of consumers obsessed with these art forms. Then there are the earlier, more traditional forerunners, ukiyo-e woodblock prints with their absence of perspective, their two-dimensionality of ancient Japanese art that would give rise to naming the style of his as ‘superflat’; differentiated from the western approach in its emphasis on surface and flat planes of color.  As for the blurring of high art with consumerism, it is one of Murakami’s dearly held tenets that demarcations between fine art and popular merchandise are completely un-Japanese and that any back-and-forth status considerations between museums and department stores as a venue is unnatural in Japanese society.  

Murakami might also be the most self-effacing artist today. He boldly claims (though not without an air of puckish irony) that he has no talent and no skill. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is perfectly suited for the time. Take those deliriously happy flowers. They debuted in 1995, proliferated, and became verily ubiquitous. Place them in the context of a circular canvas, and traditional western associations in a work such as Want to Hold You are there to be noted. For one, Tondos, or circular paintings were much in favor by Michelangelo and Rubens during the Renaissance as a symbol of perfection. Want to Hold You also creates the optical sensation of dynamic expansion; an effect well known in the Op Art world, particularly that of Vasarely whose sophisticated use of dimensional vectors upon spherical swelling grids creates the optical illusion of volume. That dynamic is in play here.  And lastly, beneath the surface of these seemingly unconditionally happy and joyful flower characterizations there is the suggestion of deeper and darker undertones; hidden tears if one seeks to find them. Under all those iconic smiles, a darker evocation, the collective trauma of the bombings that ‘created layers of oppressed and contradictory emotions. On one hand, a sense of powerlessness played out in cute characters and on the other, a fascination with power and destruction.’ Even in the world of Pop Art, or its postmodern derivative, for the Japanese that experience is never far from the collective psyche.