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I'm a geek person. I'm embarrassed, I'm sorry, but I'm here.

Takashi Murakami is attempting to explain why a fleet of SUVs patterned with the fantasy female figures of anime are doing parked at GEISAI, the Tokyo fair he established for emerging artists in 2001. Here on the fourth floor of the massive Tokyo Big Sight convention centre, young women flaunt fetishistic maid outfits, posing for photographs in a faux classroom, while young men storm a concert stage dressed in army fatigues. The denizens of Murakami's world are drawn from Japan's otaku subculture, inspired by the mainly male-imagined manga comics and anime films that in turn have fed the so-called 'superflat' artistic practice of Takashi Murakami, cultural phenomenon.

With his Kaikai Kiki corporation's prodigious output of factory-fabricated sculpture, painting and merchandise - from thrift shop confectionary to high-end fashion, not to mention a commercial art fair and upcoming feature film - the usual art world dichotomies of high/low, East/West, pop/conceptual, art/commerce have been effectively flattened out and rolled into one. Central to his current survey exhibition 'MURAKAMI', now in Frankfurt, is a Louis Vuitton gift shop, where the artist's collaborations with fashion designer Marc Jacobs can be purchased. When asked recently to comment on his art's relationship with consumerism, Murakami offered the following response:

Well consumerism was something born in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and then became very active in the 1980s and 1990s ... You might consider consumerism as just ordinary purchasing behaviour, but Japan is becoming poorer and poorer so that people cannot mass consume anymore. Therefore today we are facing how to restructure our life and, looking at Japanese demographics, more than 30,000 people are over 100 years old, and 1.5 million people are 78 years or older. Looking at this, what we are trying to do is resurrect the old way of life in Japan, so I have no intention of approaching consumerism myself...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.