Takashi Murakami sat dashing off a portrait of the artist Shahzia Sikander, one of several high-profile personalities he would sketch that afternoon in late April in advance of his new exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cameras clicked and whirred, focused less on his subjects than on the artist himself, who was kitted out for the occasion in a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a loosefitting frock coat and an outsize helmet that lent him the look of a rainbow-crested chicken.
The peripatetic Tokyo-based artist, entrepreneur, cultural critic and self-styled brand had arrived in the wee hours to oversee the installation of “Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” his exhibition, set to open to the public on May 25, complete with a true-to-scale replica of a portion of an ancient temple at Nara in Japan.
But Mr. Murakami, 63, seemed to take the moment in stride, sketching tirelessly as a small crowd craned to take in his performance. His playfully eccentric get-up was conceived partly to captivate his followers. They are the critics, collectors, hypebeasts and, at least as ardently, a world of tastemakers and style-setters — among them Usher, Pharrell Williams and the fashion entrepreneur Sarah Andelman — who travel in his orbit.
Some have embraced him as a puckishly endearing mascot, the irreverent embodiment of his daftly cartoonish characters. Those with deep pockets collect his work. Others, for whom high art is out of reach, snap up one in a steady proliferation of small-scale interpretations of his most familiar pieces: the trinkets, T-shirts, housewares and handbags that serve as a relatively accessible form of brand extension.
His image, a variation on the manga and anime and emoji-inspired characters that populate his work, is strategic. “Takashi is a style icon, aware of the role an artist can play in a public sphere,” said Sky Gellatly, who forged relationships between Mr. Murakami and a number of artists and lifestyle brands. “His attention to the details of his outfits are part of a holistic expression for his work and his collaborations.”
Well aware of some followers’ cultlike enthusiasm, the artist himself is loath to let them down. “In a competitive world, there are just two choices,” he said. “You can make a new movement,” he explained, referring to Superflat, a Murakami coinage for a pop-infused movement that erodes the distinction between fine art and commodity. “Or you can be the new guy.
“That is why every two years I change my style,” he said. “That way, the audience may be thinking, ‘Oh, this is not boring.’”
Small chance. Indeed, Mr. Murakami is having a buzzworthy year. His show in Cleveland is an expanded version of one in 2022 at the Broad in Los Angeles. He exhibited with Gagosian in London and, just last week, arrived to take in his show at Gagosian in Manhattan. The exhibition, “Japonisme, Cognitive Revolution,” inspired by traditional Japanese art, highlights Mr. Murakami’s interpretation of prints by the 19th-century master Utagawa Hiroshige.
All of this is to say nothing of the recent outpouring of Murakami brand collaborations. They include, most prominently, the reissue and update of his 2003 collection of handbags and accessories first conceived with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton. The new collection, unveiled in January in partnership with Pharrell Williams, the creative director of men’s wear for the luxury brand, is modeled by Zendaya no less.
The artist is candidly pleased with its success. “I had very good luck with the first collaboration,” he said. “If sales are good this time, it is a great way of expanding my work and promoting my name. It’s kind of a win-win.”
This spring, he released a Major League Baseball collection celebrated with pop-ups in Los Angeles and Tokyo and sold through Complex stores. At Frieze last week, he introduced a group of limited-edition, panda-decorated platters in support of the Coalition for the Homeless.
To some, his high-end goods are out of reach. (The Vuitton monogram bags sell for as much as $5,000.) But fans flock to his shows just the same. “His aesthetic is pleasing to the eye but also warming,” said Gina Jean, who milled in the crowd at Gagosian in Chelsea last week. Ms. Jean, an interpreter for asylum seekers at the Red Cross and a former model booker, added, “This show has actually inspired me to purchase something small so I can say Murakami designed it.”
Garrett Laird, an art writer and critic, admired the artist’s talent for “invoking the past with a sense of play.” He has yet to invest in Murakami-branded wares, he said, “but I see them everywhere.”
Art world professionals view the artist as a trailblazer. “His landmark 2003 collaboration with Louis Vuitton redefined the possibilities of fashion-art partnerships, introducing a new visual economy in which luxury, playfulness and critique could coexist,” said Matthew Yokobosky, the senior curator for fashion and material culture for the Brooklyn Museum.
Mr. Yokobosky, who designed @Murakami, a retrospective in Brooklyn in 2008, complete with dedicated Louis Vuitton boutiques within the galleries, observed that the latest Vuitton rollout resonated in the fashion world “precisely because it mirrors a culture driven by accelerated image circulation, global cross-pollination and the collapse of traditional boundaries between fine art, commercial design and mass media.”
“The collection remains relevant,” he said, “because it taps into something deeper, and perhaps that is joy.”
Or perhaps, something darker.
In Cleveland, Mr. Murakami sat obligingly in front of “Hustle’n’Punch by Kaikai and Kiki,” one of his most familiar works. The artist, who tends to speak in densely-packed paragraphs, confided that he struggled with A.D.H.D. He closed his eyes as he spoke, the better to marshal his thoughts. His zany costume notwithstanding, he was in no mood to clown.
“While on the surface the works in this show might seem beautiful and cheerful, when I’m creating my work, I’m very much influenced by the spirit of the moment,” he said. “This retrospective and the works I’ve just completed and those I will continue to show visibly reflect the mood of the times.”
He was deeply influenced by Hiroshige’s serenely nostalgic woodblock prints, he said, in particular the “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” (now Tokyo), made in the aftermath of an earthquake that had decimated the city.
His own work addresses the historical traumas that affected his youth and continue to trouble him, chief among them the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War and, later, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the Covid-19 pandemic. “Today, tensions with China are also being reflected in my work,” he said.
Yet it is useless, he argued, to try to impose meaning on his canvases. His images come from within, he said. “They can’t be directly related to anything in existing culture.” The idea, he said, is to sever links with reality, while remaining practical.
“Making art is a job,” he said, “and I am in a rush.” Mr. Murakami, who employs some 300 people at Kaikai Kiki, his studio in Japan, is impelled to increase and vary his output. His urgency intensified, he said, by a sense of impending mortality and, not less, by a dread that he may eventually the suffer fate of his father, who battled Alzheimer’s.
“These days, I am very fearful of not becoming myself,” he said. He has found alternative means of self-expression, some that extend beyond the frame.
He worked with the set designers of the television series “Shogun” to recreate the Yumedono, or Hall of Dreams, of the Horyuji Temple at Nara. Still under construction at this writing, with workers clambering over its framework, it is positioned to greet visitors entering the museum in Cleveland.
“Shogun” itself moved the artist profoundly. “It depicted a time of civil war and how in that time people were always living facing death,” he said. He was struck by the show’s exploration of hara-kiri, the Japanese ritual suicide. The act is accompanied by the recitation of a poem that summarized and placed meaning on one’s life, he explained. “It meant ending one’s life in a controlled way.”
“My death poem is my art,” he said.
He is also working on a film, a candid homage to “Edge of Tomorrow,” in which Tom Cruise portrays a protagonist trapped in a time loop, dying, then reviving to relive the same day, gaining wisdom and experience with each cycle.
“When I am watching this movie, my feeling is free,” Mr. Murakami said. “I am struggling, yet at the same time escaping, holding onto the memories that will inform my vision for another life.”
Ruth La Ferla is a reporter in the Style section of The Times whose coverage ranges across fashion, influential personalities and societal trends.
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