Murakami, 61, has become a brand unto himself thanks to his loveable technicolour paintings that mix traditional Japanese art motifs with modern anime and manga.
His paintings have sold for millions of dollars, led to fashion collaborations with Louis Vuitton and Kanye West, and been shown at some of the world's great institutions, prized as insightful commentary on the fine line between art and commerce.
It has not always made him popular with Japan's art establishment, but Murakami likes being a disruptor.
He sees another wave of change coming thanks to AI-powered software.
"The generational change will be dramatic," he told AFP at the opening of a new exhibition at the Gagosian gallery on the outskirts of Paris.
It reminds him of the arrival of the Apple II computer in the 1980s that swept away an older generation of design professionals, but empowered those who embraced it.
"AI will certainly do damage to technical trades but I don't think it will be able to block our ideas," he said.
"The wackiest ideas, those that even AI cannot generate, will become even more valuable."
That does mean power perhaps shifting from artists to tech engineers, who will be able to explore things that are hard to imagine at the moment.
"Artists who create familiar things will be left behind," he said.
"I myself work with a certain kind of fear of one day being replaced."
- 'Not very appreciated' -
Ironically, Murakami says he was touched to finally receive some praise from a more traditional part of Japanese society with his recent work in homage to Kabuki theatre.
He spoke to AFP in front of an enormous 23-metres-long by 5-metres-high fresco that tells a Kabuki narrative in his dazzling, cartoonish style.
"I'm not very appreciated in Japan," he said, wearing Bermuda shorts and a jacket adorned with his famous smiling flowers.
"My reputation is fairly bad because I'm seen as presenting a false image of Japanese culture to the rest of the world.
"This is the first time I was welcomed in this way in Japan. I was very pleased."
- 'A new continent' -
Nonetheless, his commitment to technological change is clear.
Visitors to Saturday's gallery opening -- requiring some dedication since it was hidden away among the private jet hangars near Charles de Gaulle airport -- were set to receive an NFT of a flower-adorned virtual coin.
The show includes a wall of NFT-style pixelated portraits that draw a line from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to current tech honchos Vitalik Buterin and Elon Musk.
Like all his work, they are deceptively simple, seemingly printed, yet in fact painstakingly painted by hand and then lacquered to remove any sign of human involvement and create his renowned "Superflat" aesthetic.
He sees this work as building a bridge between traditional and digital art, but admits they can be a hard sell.
"Collectors who have been fans of mine for a long time clearly have some trouble with these pixelated drawings," he said.
"But I created my works following Japanese or Eastern styles, not Western, and I consider pixel art to be a sort of representation of Japanese culture from the video games of the 1970s."
The world of crypto is "like a new continent" still being discovered.
"It will take several more years for people to get used to it," he said.
AI statue designed by Michelango on show in Sweden
Stockholm (AFP) June 9, 2023 -
A historical dream team of five master sculptors, including Michelangelo, Rodin and Takamura, have trained artificial intelligence (AI) to design a sculpture dubbed "the Impossible Statue", now on show in a Swedish museum.
"This is a true statue created by five different masters that would never have been able to collaborate in real life," said Pauliina Lunde, a spokeswoman for Swedish machine engineering group Sandvik that used three AI software programmes to create the artwork.
Shaking up traditional conceptions about creativity and art, the stainless steel statue depicts an androgynous person with the lower half of the body covered by a swath of material, holding a bronze globe in one hand.
On show at Stockholm's National Museum of Science and Technology, the statue measures 150 centimetres (4 feet 11 inches) and weighs 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds).
The idea was to create a mix of styles from five famed sculptors who each made their mark on their era: Michelangelo (Italy 1475-1564), Auguste Rodin (France 1840-1917), Kathe Kollwitz (Germany 1867-1945), Kotaro Takamura (Japan 1883-1956) and Augusta Savage (US 1892-1962).
"Something about it makes me feel like this is not made by human being," Julia Olderius, in charge of concept development at the museum, told AFP.
Visitors will note the muscular body inspired by Michelangelo, and the hand holding the globe inspired by Takamura.
Sandvik's engineers trained the AI by feeding it a slew of images of sculptures created by the five artists.
The software then proposed several images in 2D which it believed reflected key aspects from each of the artists.
"In the end we had 2D images of the sculpture in which we could see the different masters reflected. Then we put these 2D images into 3D modeling," Olderius said.
But is it art, or technological prowess?
"I don't think you can define what art is. It's up to every human being to see, 'this is art, this is not art'. And it's up to the audience to decide," Olderius said.
Amid debate about the role of AI in the art world, Olderius said she was optimistic.
"I don't think you have to be afraid of what AI is doing with creativity or concepts or art and design," she said.
"I just think you have to adapt to a new future where technology is a part of how we create concepts and art."
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