Takashi murakami silkscreen on NTWRK $500, by Gentle Mental on Jun 9, 2022 5:29:58 GMT 1, It’s for his fans. It’s quite unusual to have a Murakami print like this one. From kaikaiki on the painting:

Takashi Murakami, Rhapsody of a Foolish Family, 2019
Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel
φ120×5cm
©2019 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Portrait photo by Kentaro Hirao
To celebrate the publication of Good Timing Club, an art book by Fukujuro Murakami, artist Takashi Murakami’s father, Kaikai Kiki Gallery is pleased to present a group show featuring Fukujuro along with his two sons, Takashi and his younger brother and Nihonga artist Yuji.
For decades, Fukujuro, an 85-year-old former taxi driver, kept producing artworks in his spare time. His sons are each an established artist who specializes in contemporary art and Nihonga, respectively.
We are excited to invite you to their first-ever father-and-sons exhibition.

A Message from Takashi Murakami
Rhapsody of a Foolish Family: Fukujuro, Takashi, and Yuji Murakami is a three-person show featuring a father and his two sons.

“Family” signifies the interpersonal narrative structure in which a fertile couple pair up and have children they subsequently may or may not manage to raise, inevitably creating the inseverable tie of blood relations; love and hate pile up in layers because of this unbreakable relationship. Each family has its own exhausting story, and the world is swarming with them.

The Murakami family I belong to has its own story, but it’s not particularly a messy one. As far as drama goes, it’s pretty thin. One thing that sets us apart from other families, however, is that we produce a tremendous number of artworks between us. My father is Fukujuro and my mother is Itsuko. I am their first son, Takashi, and the second son is my brother Yuji. We are a family of four.

My father was a taxi driver. My mother was a housewife, but to supplement the family income she also worked part-time when I was in junior high school and high school. Fukujuro worked until age 75, but on the side he always created his art that amounted to junk as a hobby, accumulating them over the years. Itsuko resented them and wished to throw them all out, but on account of their long marriage she managed to put up with them, stopping short of discarding them. As a result, Fukujuro’s room increasingly filled up with junk over time.

I had opened a small gallery in 2010 within Nakano Broadway in Tokyo where I had free rein to do as I pleased. Hoping for my parents’ marital harmony, I, their son, exhibited Fukujuro’s junk for sale there, since it didn’t matter that the motivation and the content of the show were lousy. As it turned out, friends and acquaintances of Kaikai Kiki found them interesting and, granted they were cheap, bought almost the entire show.

Fukujuro subsequently had offers to exhibit at other galleries, participating in a two-person show at Tri Gallery Ochanomizu in Tokyo that specializes in ceramics and illustrations, as well as in a group show at Aoi Gallery in Osaka, the contemporary art gallery where I had made my artistic debut years ago. His works were somehow also well received at these venues.

Fukujuro may have been pleased by this turn of events, but he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s around the time his second exhibition closed. Their story now shifted from that of a harmonious marriage to one of caregiving. Drained by the responsibility, now Itsuko suffered cerebral infraction. Today, they both live in an assisted living facility.

Making an unwarranted assumption that Fukujuro’s end was near (he’s still alive), I decided to photograph his more popular works and publish an art book that the Murakami family could cherish as his tombstone. I asked Noriko Miyamura and Miwa Takahashi to edit the book; Takaya Goto, my long-time friend since my time in NY and the designer who specializes in art books, and his office, designed it. After about two years of work, we created an exquisite art book, which includes Fukujuro’s portrait by photographer Shin Suzuki.

Those who saw the book were moved in turn, and some suggested that I should do an exhibition that surveyed the publication. There seems to be a timely mixture of anxiety and sympathy regarding the way of aging life here in Japan, so this project may belong to the so-called genre of “inspiration porn,” but I thought offering up an embarrassing aspect of my family could be one form of art appreciation. So I decided to hold an exhibition, in part to promote the book.

The show will mainly feature small works by Fukujuro, with a token presentation of my own and my brother Yuji’s works. Fukujuro’s works are primarily his hobby creations such as small tools he made in everyday settings, but the origin of his art making lies in our childhood. As a young married couple my parents raised their children in poverty in downtown Tokyo, Sakashita 3 cho-me in Itabashi Ward, where they moved to from Kitakyushu in search of work. Fukujuro would wash, dry, and save the wooden boards that came with kamaboko fish cakes, constructing handmade toys for my brother and me by gluing them together. That was how he started creating.

While we worked on Fukujuro’s art book, the editors Noriko Miyamura and Miwa Takahashi found various influences of his work on mine, amusing themselves. Case in point, I have directly inherited his habit of attaching casters to wooden bases he makes. Not only my work but many pieces of furniture in my offices and studios have casters attached to them.

Fukujuro the father has passed the various negative aspects of his developmental disability onto his sons, inadvertently making art the family’s livelihood… I hope you’ll shake your head and sigh, amazed at this silly family.

Again, our plan for this exhibition is to showcase Fukujuro’s less-than-art paintings and objects, as well as pieces of furniture with casters. Alongside these, we plan to display some of my own and my brother Yuji’s artworks.

Admission is free. If the works speak to you, I hope you will purchase Fukujuro’s book. Our hope is that the embarrassing aspects of the Murakami family you find in the book will offer solace to you in some way.