‘The Andy Warhol of Japan’ is staging his biggest ever show in Sydney

How seriously can you take an artist who wears smiley flowers on his head? Who slapped octopus arms on his range of Louis Vuitton designer handbags? Who naps in a cardboard box in his studio? The artist is Takashi Murakami, often dubbed the “Andy Warhol of Japan”. And you can make up your own mind, because he’s coming to Australia.

The Tokyo-based 64-year-old is gleefully eccentric and operates prolifically at the most glamorous levels of global contemporary art. One of his chief preoccupations, he tells The Australian Financial Review Magazine via an interpreter over Zoom from Tokyo, is to keep himself amused. “My very important goal is to escape from boredom,” Murakami says. He’s certainly succeeded. Murakami has animated a music video with Billie Eilish and designed a fashion range with Lewis Hamilton. In 2003, he redesigned the Louis Vuitton monogram and those handbags became such a hit that the fashion house has collaborated with him ever since.

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