Machikado-kun / Convenience Store Edition

Born in 1962 in Tokyo, Takashi Murakami received his BFA, MFA and PhD from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Worlwide artiste, Murakami is too a smart businessman aand even a curator and a critical observer of contemporary Japanese society.

So, later, he founded the Hiropan factory in Tokyo in 1996, which will evolve into Kaikai Kiki Co, considered like a large-scale art production and art management corporation. But Kaikai Kiki Co’s aim is not only the production and marketing of Murakami's work, but to support environment for the fostering of young Japanese artists.

Murakami organized in 2000 a paradigmatic exhibition of Japanese art titled Superflat. This « Superflat » project was to tell the origins of contemporary Japanese visual pop culture to historical Japanese art. He has continued this work in impactful one-person exhibitions at leading institutions such as Coloriage (Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, Paris, 2002), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2001), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001), Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subcultures (Japan Society, New York, 2005), and at last the most paradoxical and undoubtedly spectacular into this royal french place exhibition : Murakami à Versailles in 2009