Takashi Murakami – high five :-)
Saw a great documentary yesterday about the japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and once a again I was reminded on how great his work is. So although not electro stuff I just had to throw something in here about him 
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR08ORFTft0]
About (from Wiki):
Takashi Murakami (村上 隆, Murakami Takashi), born 1 February 1962 in Tokyo, Kantō region), is a prolific contemporary Japanese artist who works in both fine arts media, such as painting, as well as digital and commercial media. He attempts to blur the boundaries between high and low art. He appropriates popular themes from mass media and pop culture, and then turns them into thirty-foot sculptures, “Superflat” paintings, or marketable commercial goods such as figurines or phone caddies.
Murakami attended the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, initially studying more traditionalist Japanese art. He pursued a doctorate in Nihonga, a mixture of Western and Eastern styles dating back to the late 19th century. However, due to the mass popularity of anime and manga, Japanese styles of animation and comic graphic stories, Murakami became disillusioned with Nihonga, and became fixated on otaku culture, which he felt was more representative of modern day Japanese life.
This resulted in Superflat, the style that Murakami is credited with starting. It developed from Poku, (Pop + otaku). Murakami has written that he aims to represent Poku culture because he expects that animation and otaku might create a new culture. This new culture being a rejuvenation of the contemporary Japanese art scene. This is what it is all about to Murakami; he has expressed in several interviews in the last five or six years the frustration that his art has risen from. It is a frustration rooted in the lack of a reliable and sustainable art market in post-war Japan, and the general view of Japanese art in and outside the country as having a low art status. He is quoted as saying that the market is nothing but “a shallow appropriation of Western trends”. His first reaction was to make art in non-fine arts media, but decided instead to focus on the market sustainability of art and promote himself first overseas. This marks the birth of KaiKai Kiki, LLC.
In 2008, Takashi Murakami made Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list, and was the only visual artist to do so.
DATAMASKIN
