Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  “When people think of artists’ studios, they imagine Jackson Pollock dancing around a canvas,” says Poe grumpily from under his beige baseball cap. “Dealers are editors and conspirators. We help determine what gets shown and how it gets shown, and we help put art in production.” Poe turns around and looks at Blum, then at me. “At the end of the day, our business is to sell symptoms articulated as objects,” he declares. “I like to think that I have a more honest relationship with our artists than some other dealers, but I don’t want to be anyone’s shrink.”

  Two days ago I visited Murakami’s three Japanese studios. My interpreter and I took a train to the prefecture of Saitama, then a taxi past vibrant green rice paddies and residential streets to the main painting studio, a barn-shaped space with beige aluminum siding. Half a dozen bicycles with baskets and a taxi with its engine running were parked outside. Murakami was on his way out, having just finished his daily inspection. He looked glum. He wore what would turn out to be his uniform of the week: a white T-shirt, baggy army-green shorts, and white Vans without socks. His long black hair was tied up in a samurai bun. I confirmed our interview scheduled for later that day at Motoazabu, his central Tokyo design headquarters. He nodded solemnly and left.

  The painting assistants looked like they’d just been chastised. This morning, as always, the staff had arrived by 8:50 (no one is ever late in Japan) and started their day by swinging their arms to recorded piano music for ten minutes of rajio taiso, or calisthenics. It’s a national ritual in which they’ve partaken since primary school. When Murakami is there, he joins in. By 9:30, when I arrived, twelve employees were dotted around a white room the size of a long tennis court. Three of them were working on a triptych of circular paintings whose grimacing flower characters also appear in the Murakami-designed opening credits of a popular Japanese TV drama. It needed to be completed for a press conference in three days. Some of the black lines were muddy and wobbly—“not crisp enough.” Some colors were dim and streaky—“not dense enough.” The platinum leaf was flaking off in parts. Plus the triptych needed to be finished “NOW!” One of the painters told me that she has a recurring dream in which Murakami is yelling at her. “He is always angry,” she explained with a shrug. “The atmosphere is usually intense.”

  One man took a photo of the first canvas with a small digital camera. Murakami is a stickler for documenting every layer of a painting, so he can follow the process even when he is out of town and look back on the layers to reproduce similar effects in future works. Two women had laid the second and third paintings flat on a long trestle table. One sat cross-legged on the floor with her eyes two inches away from the picture’s edge. She had a thin round bamboo brush in her left hand and a Q-tip tucked into her hair. The other, an artist named Rei Sato, knelt on the floor, reapplying platinum particles. They were all wearing standard-issue brown plastic sandals and white cotton gloves with the thumbs and forefingers cut out. No one had more than a speck or two of paint on his or her clothes. They worked in silence or in their own iPod worlds. When I asked Sato if there was any room for creativity in the work, she replied, “None at all.” However, she is one of the seven artists represented by Kaikai Kiki and would be showing her own art in a group show in Spain. “My work is completely different. It’s deliberately rough!” she added with glee.

  I walked around the room, snooping in corners, and discovered a plastic crate full of ten-inch-square mushroom paintings. Murakami has created four hundred different mushroom designs, so the exam given to new staff to test whether they are ready to wield a brush in his name is to paint a mushroom. Deeper in the room, I came upon a phalanx of small, round, blank canvases that had received twenty thin layers of gesso primer so they would be as flat as glass. On the ground, leaning against the wall, was another battalion of works-in-waiting. A total of eighty-five canvases were on the way to becoming what Murakami casually calls “big-face flowers” but are officially titled Flowers of Joy. Gagosian Gallery sold the fifty on display in its May 2007 show for $90,000 apiece. (The official price was $100,000, but everyone who’s anyone gets a 10 percent discount.)

  At the very back of the space was a notorious unfinished work—sixteen large panels shamefully stacked with their faces to the wall, half hidden under translucent plastic sheets. In fact, this entire studio was set up only six months ago to accommodate this very piece. Commissioned by François Pinault, the influential collector who owns Christie’s auction house, the painting was to be the fourth work with 727 in its title (the first is in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, while the second belongs to hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen). Like the other 727 paintings, it was supposed to feature Mr. DOB, Murakami’s postnuclear Mickey Mouse character, as a god riding on a cloud, which can also be interpreted as a shark surfing on a wave, inspired by Hokusai’s famous nineteenth-century woodblock print The Great Wave of Kanagawa. Murakami’s sixteen-panel magnum opus was meant to line the atrium of Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum during the opening days of the Venice Biennale, but a few skilled staff walked out on Murakami at a crucial time and the project had to be put aside.

  “Takashi’s being late on a painting for Pinault is like Michelangelo’s being late for the pope!” was the oft-repeated quip, originally made by Charles Desmarais, the deputy director for art at the Brooklyn Museum, where the Murakami retrospective would travel to in April 2008. (After that the show would open at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain.) Later that day, in his finely sliced, sashimi-style English, Murakami described his predicament in another way: “I was in big tension. They was too much tired. Every day upset. They thought, ‘Fuck you, Takashi.’ I thought, ‘Oh my god, I cannot make the work.’ But I cannot say anything to Monsieur Pinault. It was a very tough time.”

  Murakami has a painting studio in New York that mirrors this one in many respects. Linked by e-mail, iChat, and regular conference calls, it too is tidy, white-walled, and silent except for the whir of the ventilation and the occasional blow-dryer being used to dry paint. I visited twice—once in April, when everyone was working around the clock in preparation for Murakami’s Gagosian show, and once in mid-May, when people had more time to talk. On the second visit, I watched Ivanny A. Pagan, a Puerto Rican–American painter who’d recently graduated from art school. On a stool beside him were three little plastic pots. “Green three twenty-six, yellow sixty-nine, and orange twelve. It’s paint by numbers with a twist,” he told me. “I don’t want to discriminate on the basis of color, but the yellows are sticky! They’re mean because they show the brushstrokes.” He paused to sweep his brush through a tight spot on an op-art-inspired “midsized flower ball,” then added, “You would think that synthetic paint would be uniform, but all the colors are different.” Murakami is insistent that no trace of his or any other painter’s hand should be seen in the work. “We’re out of Q-tips today and I have a dust problem,” Pagan said with a heavy sigh. “It is frowned upon to touch the painting,” he added as he readjusted his gloves. “About ten days before the Gagosian show, Takashi came into the studio. Most of us were new recruits, so we had never met him. It was pretty stressful. We had to redo all fifty small flower faces.” Pagan dipped his bamboo brush in water and dried it on his jeans. “Thankfully, the painting director here, Sugimoto-san, has been working with Takashi for ten years. She’s so technically precise, it’s spectacular. She can refine paintings in a flash.” For Pagan, going to the opening of the Gagosian show was “like seeing the work for the first time.” He couldn’t believe it. “I worked on one of those flower balls for over a month, but with the varnish on it, under the lights, it was a completely different experience. We’d applied layer upon layer of paint, but for the general public I’m sure it looked like it had just arrived on the canvas.”

  Murakami is unusual among artists in acknowledging the collective labor inscribed in his work. For example, with Tan Tan Bo (2001), a three-panel painting of the ever-mutating D
OB character, which MOCA is using for its magazine advertisements (in this work, DOB looks like a saucer-eyed intergalactic spaceship), the names of the twenty-five people who worked on the piece are written on the back of the canvas. Other paintings credit upwards of thirty-five names. Similarly, Murakami’s desire to help his assistants launch their own careers is unusual. Many artists loathe losing good help and, more important, the appearance of creative isolation is central to their credibility.

  After a few hours at the Saitama painting studio, two PR women, my interpreter, and I piled into a seven-seater Toyota chauffeured by one of the nonpainting assistants, a cool dude in a fedora and vintage fifties glasses, to go to the site of Murakami’s original studio, which he set up with three assistants in 1995. Initially called the Hiropon Factory, in homage to Warhol’s Factory and his manufacturing model of art production, it was renamed Kaikai Kiki in 2002, when Murakami reconceptualized his entire operation along the lines of a marketing and communications company. While the Sega Corporation has Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo has Super Mario, Kaikai Kiki was named after the mascots that appear on its letterhead and cultural goods. Kaikai is an anodyne white bunny, while Kiki is a wild three-eyed pink mouse with fangs. Both characters have four ears each, a “human” pair and an “animal” pair, suggesting that the company is all ears.

  Our fifteen-minute journey, which passed modest but respectable homes with bushes pruned like bonsais, ended on a gravel driveway surrounded by a handful of dismal prefabricated buildings, self-seeded trees, and weeds. In addition to providing two workspaces, the location plays host to Murakami’s archive, two greenhouses containing his cactus collection, and a grand platform of pink lotuses in waist-high ceramic planters. The lotuses were so out of keeping with their humble environment that they looked as if they’d just landed there.

  In the first airless building, three studio assistants listened to a Japanese pop-rock radio station, JWAVE, as they prepared to paint a smaller-than-life-sized fiberglass sculpture entitled the Second Mission Project Ko (often called SMPKo2), a three-part work in which Miss Ko, a manga fantasy of a girl with big eyes and breasts, a tiny pointed nose, and a flat, aerodynamic belly, metamorphoses into a flying jet. The work is in an edition of three with two artist’s proofs (called APs). The first three editions had already been sold; this first AP needed to be finished in time for the MOCA show. Miss Ko’s head, hair, torso, legs, and labia were laid out separately on what looked like two operating tables. At one table, two women were cutting tape into precise shapes to cover her for spray-painting. In another part of the small room, a man was testing different shades of white for a Bride of Frankenstein–style lightning streak in her hair. Against her Barbie-pink skin, he examined swatches of creamy white, gray-white, blinding fluorescent white, and a fourth white that lay in between. He chose the two he thought worked best and said, “Murakami-san makes the final decision.” When I asked what he thought of Miss Ko’s looks, he said, “She is a masterpiece of media-world beauty, but she’s not what I want personally in a woman.”

  Murakami’s editions are differentiated not only by number but by color. The first sculpture of an edition might contain three hundred colors, while the third might feature as many as nine hundred. Murakami complicates, tweaks, and perfects the works as he goes along, playing with pigment not just as an aesthetic category but as a racial one. Some sculptures and paintings come in albino, Caucasian peach, olive brown, and jet-black versions. Later, Murakami would tell me that he thinks of Japanese skin color as “plum.”

  In the next building we politely removed our shoes, only to barge in on seven women eating rice dishes out of Tupperware containers. The Kaikai Kiki merchandise staff members were having their daily communal lunch. I was told they’d set up a temporary merchandise showroom elsewhere, so we walked across the gravel to another cardboard box of a building, where I found Mika Yoshitake, Paul Schimmel’s assistant for the MOCA show, shuffling in slippers through a sea of T-shirts, posters, postcards, pillows, plastic figurines, stickers, stuffed monsters, mugs, mouse pads, key chains, catalogues, cell-phone covers, badges, tote bags, handkerchiefs, decorative tins, notepads, and pencils. To one side, next to its original white pyramid packaging, was a notable gem—a ten-inch-high plastic sculpture called Mister Wink, Cosmos Ball. Perhaps owing to his computer-universe sensibilities, Peter Norton (of Norton Utilities) was an early adopter of Murakami’s work, and back in 2000, he and his then wife, Eileen, commissioned an edition of five thousand Mister Winks to send to friends and business acquaintances as Christmas presents. This clowny egghead character sitting in a sloppy lotus position with upturned palms was the first incarnation of Oval.

  “We’re going to have a room in the exhibition devoted to merchandise,” said Yoshitake with a mildly pained expression. “Paul wants nothing to do with the details. I’m choosing which three hundred items get shipped to L.A.” Yoshitake grew up in California and has Japanese parents. She was working on a PhD on Japanese conceptual and process art at the University of California at Los Angeles when she was poached by the museum. (Later Schimmel would tell me, “Among the art historians at UCLA, I’m like the Antichrist. I lure their best students to the dark side!”) With her art-historical knowledge and language skills, Yoshitake became an essential link between MOCA and Kaikai Kiki. “Initially, I didn’t much like Takashi’s work,” she told me. “I’m interested in ephemerality and entropy in art. I’m not a big ‘object person.’ But Takashi’s art has grown on me.” Yoshitake held a clipboard in one hand and played with her bead necklace with the other. “I’ve come to love the DOB character,” she continued. “Especially when he is on a self-destructive rampage of consumption and excess.” Yoshitake had revised her opinion about pop artists. “I used to assume that they didn’t have anything substantial to offer and that their main goal was to surround themselves with fame and fortune,” she said. “But Takashi’s got bigger ambitions. His works are not just superficial icons. His use of parody and nonsense give a critical edge to all that spectacle and branding.”

  After a noodle lunch, we headed to Murakami’s slick headquarters in a three-story office block in Motoazabu. It was at least an hour’s drive, past more rice paddies and light industrial facilities, over a major river and along an elevated highway engulfed in soundproof fencing to the plush neighborhood, not far from the designer stores of Roppongi Hills. Once there, we ascended to the studio in an elevator. When the doors drew apart, we faced a stainless steel and glass door for which a fingerprint scan and a four-digit PIN number were required. Once we were across the threshold, the swath of bare white walls and well-sanded wood floors initially evoked a gallery back room, but on closer inspection it was clearly a high-security digital design lab. The second floor housed two boardrooms and two open-plan office areas. The third floor was architecturally much like the second, except that’s where the real creative work was being done. While on my quick tour, I caught a tantalizing glimpse of a 3-D computer rendering of Oval Buddha rotating on a pedestal, but before I could get a good look I was whisked away by the PR woman.

  Murakami roamed the third floor barefoot, evidently happier than he’d been that morning, swiftly answering questions from his staff. His workstation, a sixteen-foot-long table, was situated in the center of a large room, surrounded by his team of four designers and five animators, all of whom sat with their backs to him, their gazes purposefully directed at their white-rimmed twenty-inch screens. At the hub of his table was a Mac laptop around which were scattered stacks of blank CDs, art magazines and auction catalogues, empty takeout coffee cups, and a box of mini-KitKats. On a counter at the end of the room, a triptych of face clocks told the time in Tokyo, New York, and L.A. Above them were three full-sized color printouts of the flower triptych I’d seen in progress at the painting studio.

  Had Murakami been sitting in his swivel chair, Chiho Aoshima would have been sitting within reach of his right hand. Although her location would suggest that she was working
on one of Murakami’s projects, Aoshima was actually putting the final touches on a picture for an upcoming show of her own work in Paris. Aoshima used to run Murakami’s design department, but the thirty-three-year-old artist quit to devote herself full-time to her own art. Unlike Warhol’s Factory, where, in the words of the art historian Caroline A. Jones, women were “expected to work hard for no pay, suffer beautifully, and tell all,” six of the seven artists whose independent careers are promoted by Kaikai Kiki are female.

  At the appointed time, Murakami settled into his swivel chair in a half-lotus position, one leg up, the other dangling, ready for a conversation. He offered me green tea and apologized for his English, admitting that even in Japanese, he had “no power to communicate in words. That is why I twist to the painting.” Nevertheless, he believes in the influence of media coverage and acknowledges that the studio visit is an important art world ritual for promoting art. Murakami told me that he was working on thirty or forty different projects that day. “My weak point—I cannot focus on just one thing. I have to set up many things. If just looking at one project, then immediately get the feeling it boring.” At the end of last year, Murakami was so exhausted that he spent ten days in the hospital. “That was very stressful. I bring my computer. Many assistants come to my room. Finally doctor said too much crowd, waste of money, you must go home.”

  What kind of a boss are you? I asked.

  “I am a very bad president,” Murakami responded without hesitation. “I have low technique for driving the company. I don’t really want to work in a company, but I have big desire for making many pieces. Operating the people and working on art are completely different. Every morning, I upset people,” admitted the unrelenting aesthetic micromanager. “I used to think that my staff were motivated by money, but the most important thing for creative people is the sense that they are learning. It’s like video game. They have frustration with my high expectations, so when they get my ‘yes’ for their work, they feel like they’ve won a level.” He stroked his goatee. “I’m thinking a lot about how to connect with people who are under thirty in Japan. I have to communicate with a video game feeling.”