JOYENGINE: cause sharing is cool

Hilarious new Pixar short showing with their newest flick, ‘UP’

Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton

Tokyo art superhero Takashi Murakami will be opening an animation studio in L.A. under the existing umbrella of Kaikai Kiki. Their first project will be a feature length animated film based on an earlier short. It will feature the adventures of Kaikai and Kiki, as they space travel and learn to grow watermelons with poop.

“Animation and film have always been among my greatest influences, ever since I first saw ‘Star Wars’ and Hayao Miyazaki’s films,” Murakami said in a statement. “This studio represents a great step in the evolution of Kaikai Kiki and gives me a closer proximity to the community of artists with whom I hope to collaborate as I continue my explorations of animated and live-action film.”

I can’t freaking wait! Here’s a taste:

Is amazing.  Study his work.  When he’s the next Murakami – you’ll know why.   Hint = it’s not because he’s also Asian.  However, he is pretty much the contemporary artist equivalent to Bruce Lee.  And, that’s not to say that Bruce wasn’t also an artist.

About a month back I got to check out new Takashi Murakami paintings at Blum and Poe. It was nice ’cause I got to get really close to the paintings without getting sweated by guards like his show at the MOCA LA last year.

One of the bummers about online picts are that most of them don’t show details big enough to see the detail in paintings.

I personally like taking super close up shots to figure out how artists produce their paintings. At first glance, I passed these newer works off as inkjet printed canvases (if you have a chance check out the Louis Vuiton big painting) but then when Christian Van Minnen mentioned that they look silk screen printed I was astonished on the quality of production.

I’m bummed that I didn’t just ask the people at the front. Perhaps I’ll call them.

Anyways, I hope you can see the details okay.  Let me know okay? Okay.

Showing how big these are. Christian and his wife Ashley are about 6 feet tall.

Detail of those little guys at the bottom right of above’s painting.

Icing flavor production. The texture was nice where some of the imagery was thicker than the rest.

Ryan Riss giving a tour of the place. He took us to some other sweet spots. I’ll post them later possibly maybe?

The “black hole” was super glossy while the rest was pretty matte like the above sample.

Lastly, I wanted to show the reaction of Kara crying due to how well these paintings were done.  I cried too.

Well folks, if you think these are well done, I can’t wait till I get to take legit shots of some Jeff Koons paintings.  I tried to take some shots at the LACMA but they were sweatin’ hard. Koons’ paintings are like 12 feet tall and ultra photo-realist.

I didn’t take this pict but check out this big jpg of Koons’ work here.

As you can see, we have started to find some interesting spots to check out here in Minneapolis. Although it may appear to be taken in front of a giant Murakami installation, it’s not. This flick was taken in a hallway in the Walker Arts Center. Celeste and I made sure to put this at the top of our places to see list and it was all, if not more than, what we had hoped for. We found this little area and had to snap a quick pic. How often is it that you see a room covered in a pattern by Takashi Murakami. It seems wallpaper still has something going for itself? To say the least, the Walker has tons of crazy stuff in it and is a must see on anyone’s visit to the Twin Cities, but thats another story all together. I’ll catch you all up on all of that soon enough.

During his recent design stint in Los Angeles our good buddy Ray Young Chu made it over to Takashi Murakami’s super-sized retrospective at the Moca. The show, Takashi’s most grandiose to date features more than 90 works in various media spanning the early 1990s to the present, this international traveling retrospective is an unprecedented opportunity to survey the depth and breadth of Takashi Murakami’s entire career. While taking photos is highly frowned upon, Ray managed to sneak a couple pics, but to really get the whole story you’ll have to checkout, moca.org/murakami.