Takashi Murakami

Hundreds of smiling flowers fill the surface without a gap. It is cute and airless at the same time. Murakami takes those to be the same thing. He argued that Japanese art, from classical painting to animation, is flat without depth, and named it Superflat — a proposal to treat that as a characteristic rather than a fault. On that basis he set Edo-period painting and otaku culture on the same plane. He runs his studio as a company with dozens of people producing the work. His collaborations with Louis Vuitton and Kanye West have drawn both credit and criticism for erasing the line between art and merchandise.