Takashi Murakami on NFTs, Netflix, and finding your own form of cultural identity

In these online 30-minute events, Gregory Crewdson, Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, asks each guest a list of simple questions about artistic practice, and the anticipation of an end to the pandemic crisis.

Takashi Murakami seamlessly blends commercial imagery, anime, manga, and traditional Japanese styles and subjects, revealing the themes and questions that connect past and present, East and West, technology and fantasy. His paintings, sculptures, and films are populated by repeated motifs and evolving characters of his own creation. Together with dystopian themes and contemporary references, he revitalizes narratives of transcendence in continuation of the nonconformist legacy of a group of eighteenth-century Japanese artists known as the Edo eccentrics.

Since the early 1990s Murakami has invented characters that combine aspects of popular cartoons from Japan, Europe, and the US—from his first Mr. DOB, who sometimes serves as a stand-in for the artist himself, to various anime characters and smiling flowers, bears, and lions. These figures act as icons and symbols—hosts for more complex themes of violence, technology, and fantasy.

Murakami earned a BA, MFA, and PhD from Tokyo University of the Arts, where he studied "nihonga" (traditional Japanese painting). In 1996 he established the Hiropon Factory, a studio/workshop that in subsequent years grew into an art production and artist management company, now known as Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd.

In this special final event in Season 2 of the Photography Department's pop up lecture series, Takashi Murakami took questions from audience members Lily Campbell, Eva Avenue, Nick Fernacz, Kenny Chen, and Darren Ganesh.

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Part of the 2021 reprise of the Yale Photo MFA program’s Pop Up Lecture Series via Zoom, in which Gregory Crewdson, Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, interviews guests on the pandemic crisis and the nature of artistic practice.

Full information available here: https://www.art.yale.edu/photo-pop-up...