For Takashi Murakami and KAWS, appearances (kinda) deceive. And that’s okay.
Walking the streets of New York, you’ll probably encounter a couple shirts, jackets, or hats that either have an embossed cartoonish figure with X’ed out eyes or sport an outwardly joyous flower with perfect proportions and bright colors. The contemporary artists Brian Donnelly (aka KAWS) and Takashi Murakami have taken over streetwear and pop culture with their iconic branding — Takashi Murakami with his Murakami Flowers, and KAWS with the X’ed out eyes of his reimagined cartoon characters that go by the moniker ‘Companions’.
You may recognize the Murakami flowers from Takashi Murakami’s collaboration with Drake’s OVO, Louis Vuitton, Supreme, or maybe even from his work with Vans, Britney Spears, Kanye West, or Google. Murakami’s colorful designs have seemingly touched every corner of pop culture, from the pinnacle of design to the album cover of Ye’s Graduation to the streets of fashion. And how could they not? There’s something so iconic about Murakami’s flowers, beaming outward at us and inviting us to share in their colorful joy.
While KAWS may not have made the same strides as Murakami has in pop culture, the X’ed out eyes of his Companions have become similarly ubiquitous in fashion and art. If you’re trying to recall where you saw those X’s last, it might be from KAWS’s recent collaborations with Nike and Sacai, North Face, or Air Jordan, all of which sport the stamp of the two X’s. It’s just as likely that you recognize KAWS’s work from his work with Supreme, Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak album cover, or the crossover vinyl Star Wars toys.
KAWS’s emblematic X’s aren’t quite as euphoric as Murakami flowers, clearly. It’s obvious at face value (no pun intended) that these Companions aren’t too happy — if their sullen and brooding body language doesn’t ring the bell, then their X’ed out eyes, quite clearly symbolizing death, definitely do the trick. Some Companions even have skull-like heads, reinforcing this motif of morbidity and cynicism.
While Brian Donnelly doesn’t often go into the meaning behind his work, it’s clear that he doesn’t use the historically symbolic X’ed out eyes just for the aesthetic. In an interview with Esquire, he explained how his Gone sculpture is inspired by Michelangelo’s famous Pieta, which depicts Jesus being held in the arms of the Virgin Mary after his crucifixion. He elaborates on how the sculpture is meant to evoke feelings of loss, saying that he “wanted to make a sculpture dealing with loss to tie back to the theme of the exhibition… [to]achieve the weight of that and still fill it with plenty of emotion in the sculpture”.
A side-by-side comparison of the Companions from which the iconic X’ed out eyes originated with KAWS’s collaborations reveals a glaring difference — the removal of this motif, and a morphing of the symbol’s appearance. Gone are the reminders of death and cynicism, replaced by contextless X’s that serve one purpose — branding. If you forgot that this North Face jacket was designed in collaboration with KAWS, the two X’s are there to remind you.
That isn’t a criticism of these recent collaborations — I actually own a pair of the Sacai x KAWS x Nike blazers. It’s just a reality of how the commercialization of KAWS has resulted in an aestheticization of its iconography. People see what they want to see, and they want to see not a symbol of death, but one of fashion and modernism. KAWS has encouraged this from the very start, when the brand was only graffiti that popped up alongside adverts from brands like Calvin Klein. This has continued through Companions that reimagine pop culture mainstays such as the Simpsons (the Kimpsons), the Smurfs (Kurfs), and the one and only Mickey Mouse.
As commodification and mainstream culture has morphed the appearances of KAWS’s symbolic X’s, it has also swept an important aspect of Murakami flowers under the rug. Take a closer look at those euphoric flowers and notice the tears in their eyes. Are they crying with joy, or are these tears representative of a repressed inner struggle? To most, this question doesn’t even arise because these tears go completely unnoticed. You see what you want to see — colorful flowers that are just plain happy to be representing a sought-after brand.
Behind the branding and the countless collaborations created by commercialization and mainstream-ification, Takashi Murakami’s artwork represents themes deeply rooted in Japanese culture. In 2005, as laid out in an article from the New York Times, Murakami revealed some deeper meanings of his work through his art exhibition, “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”. The show, as the name’s allusion to one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II suggests, delves into the impact of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Japanese culture. Through his art, Murakami shows how these events resulted in collective trauma that repressed contradicting emotions — an obsession with destruction, as seen in many Japanese animations, and a perception of powerlessness, which is embodied in kawaii (culture of cuteness — think Hello Kitty). In one of the pieces in which he juxtaposes these two paradoxical emotions, Time Bokan — Red, a mushroom cloud is shaped into a skull, with tiny Murakami flowers clumped together to form eyes.
In the Murakami-directed music video for Billie Eilish’s “you should see me in a crown”, we once again see that these flowers aren’t simple symbols of pure, unadulterated joy. As the almost-hidden tears of the flowers suggest, and the flower’s sudden mood shift and subsequent destruction confirm, there are darker undertones that contradict the beaming, colorful appearances of the Murakami flowers.
By diving beneath the surface of the works of Murakami and KAWS, we see that appearances deceive… kinda. It’s not as if we have to dig and dig to find a secret vault where all of Murakami’s and KAWS’s other works are hidden. It’s just that the commercialization and commodification of these brands morphs reality and creates a façade of appearances. People see what they want to see, and for most, it’s easier (no criticism!) to just accept the X’ed out eyes of KAWS and Murakami flowers as simple icons without much depth — certainly not symbols representing deep, complex themes and motifs such as death and collective trauma. Mainstream culture tends to aestheticize, and it’s no different with these two artist-brands.
Perhaps Takashi Murakami and KAWS realize this, though. They have mentioned many times how they are major proponents of the democratization of art and have backed up these words with the creation of pop-up shops, collaborations with Uniqlo (a company with the slogan of “made for all”), and in KAWS’s case, augmented reality Companion figures available to all for free. In fact, in an interview with Tobey Maguire (yes, Spider-Man), KAWS recalled the moment in which he realized that it’s always been about communication for him, from the very beginning of his career when he was only graffitiing his tag on ads in New York.
If it’s always been about communication, then why allow your work to be commodified and commercialized to the point that most people no longer associate your brand with anything other than its iconography? For Murakami and KAWS, and many other modern artists, the key is “most people”. Commercialization creates a trade-off between the reach of your work and the understanding of it. Most people will only see the X’ed out eyes and the colorful flowers, but there will inevitably be those that choose to see the true appearances of each artist’s work. For some, the X’ed out eyes won’t just be symbols of streetwear acclaim but will represent themes of death and its omnipresence. Likewise, a few will see Murakami flowers not just as colorful smiling logos on shirts, but as symbols representative of repressed and contradictory emotions that portray Japanese culture on a larger scale.
Throughout history, art has followed this pattern, but in an unintentional manner. Artists, writers, painters, musicians, and the like all seek to communicate some emotion, message, or realization to their audience, but understand that this process will never be perfect. The goal is to get as close to perfect as possible, which artists of the past have attempted to do with realism, impressionism, surrealism, and so on. Murakami and KAWS take a different route in intentionally commodifying their work — reach as many people as possible so that there will be a fraction that gains an understanding of the artist’s headspace.
