Takashi Murakami’s Discourse Strategy Of "SuperFlat"

In2000, the worldwide renowned Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami curated an exhibition named SuperFlat, in which he put together various art forms, like paintings, graphic design, fashion, as well as comics and cartoon, from Edo period to nowadays. For Murakami, the Japanese arts and its culture, different from that of the West, do not have a distinction between high and low; besides, Japan is a place where east and west fusing together. Murakami takes it as the essence of Japan and names it SuperFlat. That is, there is no difference between mass culture, such as design, comics, cartoon and fashion, and high arts, especially those have been part of art history, such as painting, sculpture and so on, in Japan. Further more, for Murakami, the form of Japanese art is flat, also. This flattened state of form and culture is manipulated by him as the common characteristics of surface and essence of Japanese culture, which is different from western culture, so as to highlight the uniqueness of Japanese culture."Flattenedness" not only is Murakami’s description of Japanese culture, but also echoes the resistance of western modern art movement influenced by oriental art against the established art system and forms, as well as the post modernist way of deconstruction of modernism, for the process of modernism to post modernism is the process of flattening and deconstructing the hierarchical system of art, which is obvious in avant-garde, conceptual art and Pop art.Thus, the historical view of SuperFlat that Takashi Murakami constructs equals the western contemporary art and that of Japan in Edo period. What’s more, SuperFlat theory affords him legitimacy of expanding his territory to the commercial and mass culture world which is considered not what a serious artist should do.The aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural ideology behind Murakami’s discourse strategy of SuperFlat under the global context by analyzing SuperFlat’s eastern and western historical context of art. In short, this ideology usually assumes binary thinkings with a tendency of essentialism. Finally, the thesis, mainly with Walter Benjamin’s "aura" theory, analyzes the way of expansion of SuperFlat as symbolic capital, so as to make clear that Takashi Murakami’s commercial promotion is actually based on the order of "high art-mass culture" and "east-west"culture. His practice is not that "flattened" as he described.Meanwhile, the thesis was expected, by this case study, to provide a reference to study of global culture, and how China, as an oriental country with unique tradition and history, reconstructs its cultural identity under the global context.