Kaikai Kiki Breeds the Next Murakamis

Already massively successful, Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami has collaborated with Louis Vuitton and is the subject of the blockbuster traveling retrospective, © MURAKAMI, currently at MOCA in LA and slated to travel around the world. But at the moment Murakami isn't focused on his own career, he's working to foster a similar commercial success for his protégés at Kaikai Kiki, his art production company/collective.

Earlier this month in Tokyo, Murakami threw a party for these artists at the launch of the Kaikai Kiki gallery—up until now the space had not really been open to the public. The dress code called for "kaikai kiki" (a possible interpretation being "stand-out strange"), and models in maid costumes roved through the crowd while a handful of KK artist created huge, live paintings while dressed in modified anime costumes. (Kaikai Kiki's oldest member, Mr., went all out as the blue-haired Rei Ayanami from the otaku classic Evangelion). Murakami introduced the artists and presented each of them with a cake in the likeness of one of their loopy characters—the most impressive was an enormous underwear-clad elephant cake for Chinatsu Ban.

Fans of Murakami's Japanese pop culture-infused art can find a similar—and perhaps more disturbing—world in the Kaikai Kiki crew's works. Much as with Murakami's pieces, the colorful palettes and childlike figures that populate many of the artworks instill a certain optimism in the observer that's often undercut by their heavy content. Chiho Aoshima's paints bendy skyscrapers with eyes and women in eerie sexual positions as she explores a spooky world filled with prayers and curses. Aya Takano, meanwhile, already has a huge following with her pieces in which naked prepubescent, alien-like girls traverse fantasy realms that subtly confront social taboos.

It will be Rei Sato though, a newer inductee, who gets the first solo exhibit in the new gallery, which will also be her first in Japan. She draws cartoonish apparitions on photographs with a childlike fervor, giving the works evocative and cheeky titles such as "Is It Always Like This?"

On the fashion front, there have been rumblings of a Kanye West-Murakami collaboration of anime-injected jewelry ever since West showed up to New York Fashion Week last fall, wearing a blingy prototype. While Murakami's reps are still mum on the partnership, Murakami appeared at the recent gallery party in typical b-boy attire, with his own iced-out necklace, hinting that the collaboration may still be on.

—Misha Janette