Takashi Murakami is well known in the art scene for making thought-provoking paintings and sculptures, running the influential artist-led art enterprise Kaikai Kiki artist management group, curating the visionary Superflat show, and collaborating on high-end, high profile projects with Louis Vuitton.

Takashi Murakami is often billed as the next Andy Warhol. Like the American pop art icon, he fuses high and low, pulling imagery from consumer culture to produce visually arresting, highly original work. He is vigorously, ingeniosuly self-promotional.

A highly trained academician steeped in the esoteric art history of Japan, Murakami was born in 1962 in Tokyo, and received his BFA, MFA and PhD from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

He founded the Hiropon factory in Tokyo in 1996, which later evolved into Kaikai Kiki Co., a large-scale art production and art management corporation that includes Mr., Chiho Aoshima, Aya Takano, Chinatsu Ban, Mahomi Kinukata and Rei Sato.

Murakami's work has been show extensively in group exhibitions around the world, and in one-person exhibitons at leading instituitions such as Foundation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, Paris and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001); MoCA, Los Angeles (2007); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2008); Museum fur Moderne Kunst,  (2008) and the Guggenheim Museum, Billbao (2009).