Oval sitting atop a Cosmos Ball, Murakami Takashi

Exhibition Label: "Pop Goes Godzilla," Sep-2004, Kyungwon Choe Commissioned by Peter Norton Family as a Christmas Project in 2000, when it was produced and distributed in large quantity, Oval Sitting Atop a Cosmos Ball is the quintessence of Japanese pop art. The character Oval sits atop of sphere covered with multicolored smiley-faced flowers on a silver base. Its multiple faces embody a myriad of human emotions and states of being: happiness, anger, wakefulness, and sleep. The spherical head of Oval has two mouths on opposite sides, one yelling and the other displaying a manic grin. There are a multitude of eyes, winking, staring, or closed in sleep. Oval was intended to be the main figure of a triad along with two attendants named Kaikai and Kiki, a reference to a Buddhist triad sitting on high pedestals. By creating mass-produced plastic sculptures imbued with the cuteness and stylized shorthand typical of Japanese pop culture icons, Murakami Takashi blurs the lines between pop culture and “high” culture, between mass-produced commercial objects and fine art, while pursuing his ideas of art marketing, commercialization and accessibility. He named both his Japan and New York studios “Hiropon Factory” (meaning “drug factory”), as homage to Andy Warhol’s studio “Factory,” prominent in the post-war consumer culture of the 1960s. In Japan as well as New York, Murakami is considered one of the pivotal artists transplanting Japanese pop art into international soil. As seen in this display, the flower sphere of this sculpture is actually a container for a mini-CD of music. The musical piece, a mix of traditional Japanese music and ambient sound, was composed and performed especially for this project by artist Zakyumiko, a member of Murakami’s Hiropon Factory studio.