Shinji Murakami began the Atari series with the concept of repurposing elements from game development – gameplay screens, titles, and sprites – and adopting them into 2D and 3D artworks. Soon, he realized there were many more ways to approach this repurposing. Creating patterns using sprites (i.e. in-game icons) was one way to explore this potential further.

The year 2020 will be an unforgettable year in the history of humanity. Will our world ever return to a world before the coronavirus? As an artist, I’ve been working on this human-shaped sculpture – two people holding hands and facing one another – for the better part of two years. At first I created pieces for my friends: Catinca and Jamil in their wedding costumes; a pregnant Raphael with Terrence. Since these works, I have felt an urgency to participate more broadly and render this sculpture in a way meaningful to many people.

Inspired by his arrival and stay in Mänttä, Murakami reflects on the openness he finds here. Having grown up playing video games in the 1980s, Murakami remembers the space those simple games allowed for the child’s imagination. Today, the hyperrealist computer games leave little room for a player’s imagination to fill in the digital world. So too, an artist’s mind is constantly bombarded with information in cities like New York, where the artist lives, and Helsinki.

For his first exhibition in Europe, Murakami brought his Self-Portrait as Samurai to an Italian audience at Artissima, Torino.

“Be prepared to be enveloped by Murakami’s pixelated, LED world, which has its roots in 1990s game culture.” – Hyperallergic

The works in Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology make use of LEDs in a variety of styles and critically engage how the digital world influences many aspects of contemporary culture. In sculpture, the light is built into cubes of clear resin, each serving as an individual pixel. Instead of color emission resulting from light reflection, here, the sculptures emit light themselves, producing a different experience for the retina. Similarly, two-way mirrors bring viewers into the flat works walls as a matrix of pixels march before our eyes. There is a sense of something simultaneously primitive and futuristic floating across a minimalistic space map composed of binary 1’s and 0’s – digital pixels emerging from the screen to inhabit the real world, a nod to the Augmented Reality (AR) movement propelling the future upon us.

These works together create an AR like scenario. The installation littered with several hundred LED cubes, the lights create a space completely removed from the burgeoning Lower East Side of Manhattan. The 1-inch sparkling resin cubes have built-in batteries, unleashed from the constraints of electric power. For Murakami, who began as a scrappy urban artist on the streets of Tokyo in 2002, the cubes act as a new style of street art which the artist has been developing since his arrival in New York City in 2009. Beginning to experiment with light in 2012, he used luminescent paint on cube pieces and placed them in the streets, but found them not bright enough. In 2013 he gathered the chemical liquid in Glow Sticks and tried drawing with it, but ran into a myriad of practical problems as the light source would only last a few hours. It was two years later that he started experimenting with a variety of light-emitting diode lighting (LED), preferring the technology for its customizable qualities and sustainability.

@elonmusk is linked to Elon Musk’s tweeter account and updates in real time. The work highlights the opposite of the simple 8-bit technology Murakami’s work traditionally springboards from. Murakami sees Elon as the future – a vision of tech that will take the human race to Mars. It is also Murakami’s version of a text work: “I was always jealous of artists like Jenny Holzer and Christopher Wool who could use English so beautifully. As a non native speaker, I was always scared to insert my own words into works.”

Shinji Murakami’s work springboards from the philosophy of Gunpei Yokoi, the famous inventor of Nintendo’s Game Boy: Withered Technology​ – referring to a mature technology that is cheap and well understood; and Lateral Thinking – the finding of radical new ways of using such technology. Le Coeur (The Standard) plays with this relationship. Love is a mature emotion that is cheap and well understood; but today we must find radical new ways to access it within ourselves and share it with others.

While Murakami does not believe that profound human understanding has caught up to the explosive evolution of modern computer technology, he does have faith that humans are capable of love for others. The pixelated expressions of 8-bit video games at the root of his work, which are one withered part of this evolutionary process, speak to our child selves, a time when love was not so hard and we were never afraid to share it with those around us regardless of race or creed. Murakami interrogates lateral thinking of this pixel, and with Le Coeur, he calls upon us to do the same with love.

The installation graced the roof of The Standard New York during the winter season of 2017-2018.

“Murakami, who is based in New York, started his career in the street over 15 years ago, tagging minimalist graphic representations of bunnies, hearts and flowers on Tokyo’s urban canvas. Back then, his aim was already to engage a cross-generational, cross-cultural audience—so by the time emoji became a global language, the universally recognized hieroglyphs had natural appeal for the artist.

Murakami prepared all of his works digitally. Using Google SketchUp, he maps out the building blocks of each sculpture, then goes offscreen and into the woodshop. There, the wood is cut, primed and painted. The paintings are planned out in Photoshop and Illustrator, then projected onto the canvas for precision tracing and painting.
- Vice

The rise in popularity of Emoticons in the West has followed the same course as how Ernest Hemingway describes a man going broke: “gradually then suddenly.” Now, Emoticons seem to be everywhere from Hollywood movie billboards to, well, the Oxford Dictionary but Shinji Murakami the world is just catching up to his love affair with the pictograms originally developed by Japanese mobile phone operators in the late 90s.

Using the idea of Emoticons as pixels and, in turn, pixels as building blocks, Murakami masterfully sculpts his objects from wood creating perfect replicas of the ideograms we now so casually send.