On an Endless Journey on a Time Machine With Author Fujiko F. Fujio! 2018

Takashi Murakami’s filled this canvas to the brim with all these characters and rainbow flowers, can you imagine painting all those things, over and over again? Murakami’s work is all about this tension between high art and low culture, right? It feels like he's asking, what does it mean to make art in a world that's saturated with images and icons. There’s something very Warholian in the screen-printed feel of this piece. In his own way, he's wrestling with the same questions. That crazy layering, and those colors - it’s like being bombarded with information. The gesture of the screen-print repeats motifs but also alludes to the mechanization of contemporary image-making. He's exploring these ideas about what it means to be an artist in the age of mass production. And in so doing, he reminds us that art is always in conversation with the world around it, that the conversation itself is endless, and that the artist is in the middle of that conversation.