Born in Tokyo in 1962, Takashi Murakami studied nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, at the Tokyo University of the Arts, where he completed his PhD in 1993.
His practice dismantled the boundary between fine art and commercial culture, developing the Superflat theory: a visual language rooted in manga, anime, and the flattened pictorial space of Edo-period woodblock printing, into a body of work that operates at every scale, from canvas to sculpture to fashion collaboration. He founded the Kaikai Kiki studio in 2001 and has exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Château de Versailles, Tate Modern, and MoMA. His collaborations with Louis Vuitton and Kanye West brought the work to audiences well outside the gallery system. He is based in Tokyo and New York.
