Takashi Murakami surely likes trippy visuals thus making his art more interesting for the

extremely not sober and the sober audience. These pictures do not portray an immediately

recognizable message or grand meaning, but rather demonstrate the “superflat” technique by

Murakami. In this case, superflat is my vivid description of the postmodern art movement in

which the traditional Japanese graphic media is portrayed as a dimensionless, shallow and

compressed art.

The presentation of Kaikai and Kiki, placed in the foreground of the artist’s iconic attractive

flowers combines Pop, Otaku and anime within a stylized image plane. It helps to portray the

elements of the Japanese culture that recalls the former Japanese printmaking conducted in the

19th century. In my opinion Murakami’s art is more superior tan the western pop art. It is

successful combination of flexible and creative mix of the low and high or Western and Eastern

aesthetics. According to me, the Japanese artists that presented their art work before had

adopted popular imagery in fine art just to conform to the western avant-garde. The new

Japanese pop artists have delivered and conveyed their inspiration drawn from the ‘authentic’

Japanese experiences with otaku, therefore enabling them to bravely confront their historical

past as well as portray the colonial origin of the brand new pop imagination.

Murakami as played an essential role in expanding the Japanese art markets. Other Japanese

artists like Nara and Hiroshi Sugimoto has shown interest in Japanese contemporary arts. They

have upheld the Japanese culture and depicted it as an amalgamation of imported and foreign

cultures as utilized by the Kano style of painting during the Edo era. In simple, they employ the

‘deodorizing’ technique to employ the Japanese soft goods like the manga, anime as well as
popular culture games and consciously strip them of the signs of national origin to help increase

the marketability and target international customers.