The term is Takashi Murakami's own, his manifesto on the way various forms of graphic design, pop culture and fine arts are compressed -- flattened -- in Japan. The term also refers to the two-dimensionality of Japanese graphic art and animation, as well as to the shallow emptiness of its consumer culture.
Murakami first arrived at the concept of superflat as it pertained to his own art. "I'd been thinking about the reality of Japanese drawing and painting and how it is different from Western art. What is important in Japanese art is the feeling of flatness. Our culture doesn't have 3-D," he says. "Even Nintendo, when it uses 3-D, the Japanese version looks different from the U.S. version. Mortal Combat in the U.S comes out as Virtual Fighter in Japan and it's different."
He had even noticed it back in his art history classes - searching for connections between nihon-ga and animator Kanada. The link, it turned out, was flatness. He decided that Kanada's animated sci-fi explosions were simply consecutive design motifs. (A still from Kanada's 1979
Galaxy Express 999 is included in the Superflat show.)
One notion of flatness led to another -- the compression of genres in the pop-inflected work of younger artists. "The new generation doesn't think about what is art or what is illustration," Murakami explains. "Their work is 'no genre.'"
Murakami points out that his transformation partly the result of Japan's long recession. The bubble burst in the early '90s, creating a generation that faced a level of economic uncertainty unknown since the '50s. Murakami feels that Japan's long celebration of consumerism has turned to critique.
"The Japanese people get fed TV and media for 24 hours a day," he says. "Now, we have a chance to think, 'what is my life?'" Consumer culture looks only one direction, not evolved. In the '80s, Japanese people didn't think about the meaning of life because of the strong consumer culture. Now, people are realizing there is an end. They have to think about it more than in the past. Young people are looking outside of consumer culture and asking, 'What is life?'" Superflat artists, Murakami says, create their own version of popular culture to draw attention to the dominance of the media, entertainment and consumption. Significantly, many in the exhibition work in the industries they critique. In addition to fine artists, there are commercial photographers, fashion designers, animators, graphic designers and illustrators. Sexual innuendo and black humor are popular topics throughout the show.
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/drohojowska-philp/drohojowska-philp1-18-01.asp
..and then you cut it up to make your own 'custom' designs...
