Change of Voice in a Material - The Case of M 物質の変声期　Mの場合

This is a work first exhibited in September 1964 in the show "Change of Voice in a Material" (Akiyama Gallery) by five artists including Murakami. The artist started to produce paintings with numbers in it in the late 1950s, as an attempt to eliminate emotional elements from painting and find new forms of expression in the resulting mechanical world. This attitude led in his 1960s works of the injection syringe series. While Abstract Expressionism, which had emerged in the 1950s and was the dominant trend at the time, pursued hot and vivid expressions of emotions, Murakami sought only to express worlds which were cool and suffused with tension. The injection syringe series of works come in two types, those in which the syringes are placed in a regular pattern like that of an integrated circuit in an constructive composition, and those which feature the syringes in a nonconstructive way. This work is a representative example of the former. Murakami stopped using injection syringes in the late 1960s, but his interest in conceptual expressions employing numbers and signs has not diminished, as we can see in his later works reminiscent of meteorological diagrams, which are circuit plans for atmosphere.