Superflat
Superflat is a postmodern art movement founded by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, named and launched with the 2000 exhibition Superflat that toured West Hollywood, Minneapolis, and Seattle. The word names the flattened forms of Japanese graphic art, animation, pop culture, and fine art - and, in Murakami's reading, the "shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture" after the bubble economy burst. Murakami deliberately refuses a fixed definition so the movement can evolve, and stretches it backwards across Japanese art history: he cites Katsushika Hokusai's Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit (1830-32) as Superflat, and traces a lineage of Edo-period eccentricity through painters such as Kanō Sansetsu and Itō Jakuchū, following art historian Nobuo Tsuji's The Lineage of Eccentricity. Works run from candy-bright sculpture and painting to digital graphics, engaging otaku culture, consumerism, and cuteness as flat surface.
Defining characteristics
- Radical flatness: no perspective, depth, or modeling - forms locked to the picture plane
- Crisp outlines and saturated, uniform color fields drawn from manga, anime, and ukiyo-e
- No hierarchy between fine art, pop culture, and commercial design
- Cute, playful surfaces charged with consumer and otaku culture
- Glossy fiberglass sculpture translating anime-derived figures into physical objects
- Historic depth flattened too: Edo-period painting and contemporary anime treated as one continuous surface
Key figures
- Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) — Founder and theorist of Superflat; curated the 2000 exhibition and leads the Kaikai Kiki company
- Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) — Childlike, graffiti-like figures set over echoes of old Japanese ukiyo-e
- Chiho Aoshima (b. 1974) — Digital pop landscapes populated by floating spirits and nature
- Aya Takano (b. 1976) — Painter of slender, floating figures in a weightless, manga-inflected universe
Example works
- Hiropon — Takashi Murakami (1997)
- My Lonesome Cowboy — Takashi Murakami (1998)
Sources
- Superflat - WikiArt institution
- Superflat - Wikipedia encyclopedia