Kaikai & Kiki; Dreaming of Shangri-la 2015

Takashi Murakami made this incredibly busy painting called Kaikai & Kiki; Dreaming of Shangri-la, and I love how it doesn’t hold back. The colors are so saturated, almost cartoonish, and the surface is slick, like it's been lacquered. It's a world you can dive into. What grabs me about this piece is how the flat, almost graphic characters, Kaikai and Kiki, float on this sea of smiling flowers. It's like Pop Art exploded into a field of psychedelia! There's something about the way he renders each flower, almost mechanically, yet they all feel unique. Murakami reminds me of artists like Elizabeth Murray who also weren't afraid to mix high and low art, to create these wonderfully strange and playful images that get stuck in your head. It makes me wonder, what other worlds are we missing if we don’t let our imaginations run wild?