Nasty cartoons from Japan.

View images from the exhibition.

Walls of cartoon flowers with mad smiley faces, oversized eye-adorned mushrooms, cutesy but worryingly boggle-eyed characters. Welcome to the manic, brightly-coloured and somehow sinister world of Takashi Murakami.

In his paintings, sculptures and merchandise, 40-year-old Murakami riffs on Japanese popular culture, primarily otaku (the subculture of manga, anime and video game obsessives). But it’s also accessible to Western audiences through its Pop Art dimension and sheer vivacity.

His trademark character Mr DOB (who appears in the sculpture DOB In The Strange Forest) is reminiscent of both Mickey Mouse and Sonic The Hedgehog. But there’s something heavier going on here. It’s hinted at in the manic eyes of Murakami’s characters. It’s unleashed fully in the show’s centrepiece painting Tan Tan Bo Puking, aka Geo Tan, where the cartoon character subject is bearing fearsome jagged teeth, and the whole lot is melting. It’s like cartoon Dali, sure, but it’s also another reminder that Japan experienced the flesh-melting horror of atomic attack.

Murakami’s work might be colourful but, as with most anime, there’s an apocalyptic, religious dimension to the deceptively innocent cartoon psychedelics.

Groovy. But weird. Daniel Etherington 14 November 02

The Takashi Murakami exhibition runs from 12 November-26 January 2003 at the Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London.

useful link: serpentine gallery: murakami