This weekend the hotly anticipated Takashi Murakami retrospective opens at the Brooklyn Museum. Organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, © MURAKAMI makes its second and last U.S. appearance before continuing on to Europe. Yesterday's preview was a pop culture media event, with rapper Kanye West and retinue adding sizzle to a scene being captured by video crews from near and far.

Left to right: Superflat Jellyfish Eyes installation; Takashi Murakami at Brooklyn Museum preview; Kaikai & Kiki installation. Photos © Brian Palmer.

In 2005, Murakami introduced New York to the strangely dissonant contemporary pop subculture of Japan with his "Little Boy" show at Japan Society. Often referred to as "Japan's Andy Warhol," Murakami, 46, readily admits the pop art icon's influence, which began when the classically trained artist moved here as a young man in search of his identity.

Today he employs a stable of professional artists who work in a factory-like studio in Queens, supervised by a manager who receives Murakami's daily instructions by email from Japan. But this is not a new idea. The Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens, for example, employed numerous assistants, each a master painter in his own right. At the preview, I spoke with Paul Schimmel, the LA MoCA curator, who also tagged Rubens for comparison.

"It would be impossible for an artist of Murakami's stature to produce art at this massive scale and quantity without the help of assistants." He went on to say that like Rubens, Murakami has collectors waiting for his work and many assistants to help with the production. "By creating the art conceptually," he continued, "Murakami can leave the hand work to the studio and move on to the next series of ideas without getting bogged down."

Does the style of his art, for which he coined the term "Superflat," make this more possible, I wondered. "Murakami comes through a Japanese tradition that does not draw distinctions between the fine and applied arts," said Schimmel. He mentioned the decorative flatness of traditional Japanese painting in general, and screens in particular.

Superflat Jellyfish Eyes, an assembly of six huge silk-covered vertical panels creates the impression of a Japanese screen mounted flat on the wall. Other works take this idea to an extreme, such as the "flower room" installation, where Murakami-designed wallpaper forms the backdrop for multi-panel paintings that employ the same stylized motifs. At the center of the room, Flower Matango, a 13-foot-high sculpture, holds court like a noble from Japan's Shogun era.

Murakami says that his most important influence has been Japanese anime films and comics. Inspired by these graphic narrative forms, he has created an autobiographical art that embraces the passage of time and the process of decay. While the eye-popping colors and whimsical characters he creates have great surface appeal, Murakami's art also plumbs the depths of Japan's post-atomic anxiety.

Among the characters that stand in for the artist is DOB, whose name is derived from a Japanese expression that means, "Why? Why?" In DOBs many incarnations on display here, he evolves from a candy-colored menace to society to a cannibalistic figure whose jagged teeth ensnare his next meal. In the sculptural installation DOB in the Strange Forest, Murakami's alter ego is surrounded by mushrooms that refer to the atomic clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The raunchiness of dominatrix Miss Ko2, and her sidekick My Lonesome Cowboy (1997-1998), which give a winking nod to Barbie and Ken, is offset by their accompanying pink and blue multi-panel paintings. Murakami later morphed these eight-foot-high figures into the truly creepy three-part group, Second Mission Project Ko2 (1999-2007), which fill the 5^th floor rotunda. Off to the side is a small room with a Superflat flower patterned carpet where Murakami's video of his Kaikai & Kiki characters plays continuously. The animated film alternates with a music video of Kanye West, whose latest album cover was designed by the artist.

More DOBs, along with a massive Mr. Pointy sculpture populate the museum's ground floor atrium. But the star of the show was too tall for that space. The 18-foot-high, 6-ton platinum-clad Oval Buddha will reside instead at the at 590 Madison Avenue Sculpture Garden, between 56^th and 57^th Streets.

© MURAKAMI, complete with two shops inside the exhibition selling Murakami products and his famous Louis Vuitton bags, is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through July 13, 2006. Please check the website for details and special programs.

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