The Couch Sessions

Couch Sessions Art is in Hong Kong this week and caught the Takeshi Murakami "Flowers & Skulls" exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery on Pedder St in Central. Murakami's flowers and skulls co-exist as do joy and terror in our lives, reminding us of the fragile vibrancy of life and inexorable passing of time. These two eternal motifs are representative of his style of explicitly combining opposites - classical/modern and local/foreign. In his exhibit Murakami directly questions this dichotomy of Art as defined by Western and Eastern history, attributing the survival of the artist as learning to "resolve the collision of these two cultures". He personally addresses this by depicting the unique beauty of Asia that has blossomed in postwar Japan, to be displayed in western galleries. Murakami states that "the artist is someone who understands the borders between worlds and who makes an effort to know them", which is very characteristic of the genre-transcending music we love here at the Couch Sessions.