The "Next" Next Big Thing

Murakami Takashi's "Wink"


Although I've been seeing and liking his work for a few years now, his name always escaped me. Like many Japanese names, it sounded too much like the breeze punctuated by an exclamation or cough. To my provincial, American, suburban white girl ears all those names sounded identical. Their very foreignness gave them an indistinguishable, though highly attractive, gloss. However, just like the typical bourgeois Westerner of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, I found myself surfing the cyclic wave of a superficial, kitschy fascination with the East, or, as Edward Said puts it, Orientalism. I'll admit it: I have a Batz Maru Lunch box. And when I see any form of new Asian art or fashion, I eat it up.

But this is not the turn of the last century. It is a new Millennium. In this century, information transfer happens faster than nerve impulses. Therefore, Contemporary Orientalism has a new twist. And Murakami Takashi is doing a lot of the twisting. Or should I say, winking?

Yesterday, I saw his latest installation in Grand Central Station, Wink; a collection of room-sized helium filled balloons and large raised fiberglass circles. Everything was rounded, colored with soft pastels, and covered with nonsensical, disconnected eyes, some open, some closed, some winking. The centerpiece was a pokemon-like character he uses often, called "Oval," a white, soft creature with huge eyes and light yellow flames coming out of his head. He was sitting cross-legged and with crossed arms on a ball of bright, smiling cartoon flowers. He was sitting underneath the ball, upside down.

After thinking about other Takashi installations I've seen and doing some research, I realized that he turns everything upside down. I saw his "Project KO2" at PS1, in which, over the course of three separate sculptures, a dancing anime girl is transformed, just like a transformer toy, into a jet plane. One of the big differences between this transformer and, say, the cartoon ones on WB each Saturday morning, is that this girl has a very realistic, if hyper-delineated, vagina. When she transforms into a jet, her vagina becomes the nose of the plane. Her very feminine form becomes a typical phallic substitute, but one with female genitals at the head of it. Takashi inverts masculine and feminine, blends them, turns them upside down. He erases and redraws divisions. Just as the eyes in Wink look like a dissolving face, so is Takashi’s obvious obsession dissolving the boundaries of east/west, reality/fantasy, adult/child, and art/commerce.

One of his frequent themes is hallucinogens, and in Wink, I recognized the fiberglass circles on the floors to be the tops of the psychedelic mushrooms prominent in his other work. The artist spends his time shuttling back and forth between New York and Japan, and like a completely wired new age man, he straddles the cultural divide in techno-time, flirting with each culture's attraction to the other, until the boundaries disappear into some new surreal, liquid, pop culture comment about pop culture. His artwork immediately becomes pop fashion -- he sells t-shirts with his pokemon-like icons (another popular one:"BOB") at each event or opening. Like a sinister, cross cultural Keith Haring, his art is both a commercial product and high art. His "Wink" is

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