According to the artist Takashi Mukarami, “The world of the future, that could be like Japan, is now superflat.” The Superflat manifesto de Murakami has given a name to the most influential trends in Japanese art today.
Murakami's theory of Superflat tries to explain how the Japanese society has become more and more flat, superficial. He assures that, after the World War II, Japan was traumatized and started to deny its past, losing a large part of its identity and embracing certain aspects of the culture of the United States, like cartoons. This is how the phenomenon Otaku, the name given to manga fans, like Murakami, was born. This fascination, in youth as well as adults, for cartoons and the fanshi guzzu—from the English “fancy goods”--has become such a massive phenomenon that it has been studied by philologists and sociologists. This trend is the deliberate return to the innocence of childhood and represents a denial of the social present.
The attraction to the childish, the comic, the pop aesthetic, the inclusion of fictional characters, a kind of sexual fetishism, and above all aesthetic bi-dimensionality, are the basis of the Superflat theory, a characteristic that inherits both early animation work and traditional Japanese painting.
It's suprising that Murakami is often characterized as one of the most commercial artists in history, while he takes a critica look at the childish society of consumerist entertainment. If Andy Warhol used Campbell soup cans in his artistic work, Murakami is not only inspired by popular objects but he also manufactures them and sells them. In the same way that a traditional painter fills a canvas with colors, Murakami seems to fill the world with his objects. Prints, sculptures, animated videos, curated exhibitions, limited edition dolls, t-shirts, chocolates, gum, keychains, wallpaper, mobile phones, Monopoly games...or a limited edition Louis Vuitton purse. All from his own factory, Kaikai Kiki, that has 50 employees in its New York office, as well as representing five young artists.
The Superflat trend includes names like Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara (Hiroshaki, 1959) Aya Takano (Saitama, 1976), Chiho Aoshima (Tokio, 1974), Erina Matsui (Okayama, 1984), Tomoko Sawada (Kobe, 1977) y Kohei Nawa (Osaka, 1975). Nara hasn't developed a merchandising machine as advanced as Murakami's, his work is less flat and less industrial, and he defines himself as punk.
The new generation of artists, connected to Superflat, born in the 1970s has a greater freedom, present in the techniques they use. Murakami y Nara continue to be the spiritual fathers of the movement that represents a Japan still searching for its identity and immersed in a pop culture connected to the world of childhood.