The Story Behind Takashi Murakami’s Smiling Flowers

One rainbow flower rises above the others in Takashi Murakami’s Summer Vacation Flowers under the Golden Sky (2025). Its green stem runs down into a crowd of shorter flowers, all turned toward us. Butterflies cross the gold sky and white clouds break up the field of metal. The painting is three metres wide. From across a room, you can make out the faces. Get closer and another pattern emerges in the gold ground: embossed skulls.

The skulls are easy to miss in a photograph. At APMA Cabinet in Seoul, where the work was shown in 2025, you could move along the canvas and see how the relief catches the light. The flowers are readable from almost anywhere in the room. The skulls ask you to change where you stand.

Learning to look at flowers

Years before he gave flowers faces, Murakami studied nihonga at what is now Tokyo University of the Arts. The term came into use in the Meiji era to distinguish Japanese-style painting from Western-style oil painting. In an Artsy interview, Murakami remembered the frustration of applying crushed mineral pigments to washi paper. In graduate school he also studied large floral compositions from the 16th and 17th centuries. Those compositions offer a way to look at the flowers he painted later.

The smiling flower appeared in his work in 1995. It has a face you could draw from memory: two small eyes and an open mouth inside a ring of petals. The outline stays legible even when the petals change colour or shrink to the size of a button. It’s an economical bit of drawing, closer to a character in an animation than a botanical study. Put several of those flowers together, though, and the old compositional questions return. Which bloom should catch the eye first? How much room do the stems get? What happens to the space between them?

A flower with nowhere to stand

In Flower Ball 2 (2002), there’s hardly any space between the blooms. The acrylic-painted sphere, made with canvas and wood, is a metre across. Near the middle of the photograph, a dark purple face with a yellow grin is surrounded by cream petals. Along the rim, the blossoms narrow as the surface turns away. There’s no soil and there are no stems to tell you which way is up. In person, a step to the side would bring a different set of flowers into view.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago featured Flower Ball 2 in its 2017 survey of Murakami’s work. The sphere complicates his idea of Superflat, which brings the flat picture planes of Japanese painting into conversation with the graphics of manga and anime. Up close, each face is drawn in simple blocks of colour. Step back and the field of flat shapes has a volume of its own.

What the gold leaves room for

A different use of flowers took shape at Versailles in 2010. For Kawaii—Vacances: Summer Vacation in the Kingdom of the Golden, Murakami arranged a band of grinning blooms on a gold-leaf painting and carried the flower pattern into stained-glass lamps and a floor covering. When the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, recreated the ensemble in 2017, it drew a comparison with Poppies, a 17th-century work from the school of Tawaraya Sōtatsu. The generous stretches of gold and saturated colour make the connection visible. With the lamps and patterned floor, Murakami brought that relationship between flowers and gold off the canvas and into the room.

Gold does something quieter in “Kikka-Ryūsui-zu” Kaikai Kiki Style (2024). A dark stream runs behind a spray of chrysanthemums. Fine gold lines turn in the current, while leaves shift from blue-green to pink and violet. The flowers have patterned centres where you might expect eyes and mouths. Seen after the packed sphere, the stems are a surprise. You can follow them through the painting and see which blossoms belong to the same branch.

The grins and skulls of the 2025 painting had already met in Blue Flowers & Skulls (2012). Speaking at the MCA in 2017, he described how colour could make an image of death approachable to children and leave them with something to wonder about later. In the Seoul panorama, the gold does some of that work. From a distance it’s the bright sky above a field of flowers. Up close it has a pattern of its own.

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