For Art Basel Paris 2025, Takashi Murakami transforms the Balcon d’Honneur of the Le Grand Palais into a dreamlike ocean of colour and form.
His eight-metre-high octopus sculpture, created in collaboration with Louis Vuitton, stands as a radiant fusion of architecture, sculpture, and light. Inspired by Chinese lanterns, the creature’s glowing tentacles unfurl across the vast exhibition hall, inviting visitors into Murakami’s surreal world — one that oscillates between the playful and the profound.
The octopus’s illuminated head reveals the artist’s iconic Superflat Jellyfish Eyes motif, a symbol that has haunted and delighted his work since 2001. It channels the uneasy balance between fear and fascination, turning introspection into spectacle.
Here, under the dome, those eyes watch and welcome — reflecting the audience as part of the living artwork itself.
An Immersive Landscape of Light
More than a sculpture, the installation is a total environment — a pulsating organism that reshapes space through light and motion.
Visitors enter through a wide, tentacular arch, surrounded by Murakami’s original sketches that animate the walls in a rhythmic explosion of colour.
Beneath their feet, a custom carpet patterned with the same tentacle motifs extends the illusion, blurring the boundaries between floor, wall, and structure.
As daylight filters through the Grand Palais’s glass canopy, the octopus shimmers with shifting hues — pink at dawn, violet by afternoon, golden by sunset.
By night, it glows like a celestial being, its translucent skin breathing with the rhythm of the surrounding architecture.
Myth Reimagined
Murakami’s creature emerges from the mythology of the Kraken, a symbol of engulfment and the unknown, which the artist revisits with characteristic irony and tenderness.
In this new work, destruction becomes creation: the monstrous turns playful, and fear transforms into joy.
This reinterpretation recalls his 2017 series The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, where self-consumption becomes a metaphor for endless renewal.
The installation’s exuberance embodies Murakami’s lifelong exploration of cultural hybridity — blending Japanese tradition with pop aesthetics, spirituality with humour.
Here, the octopus becomes a cosmic figure, a bridge between the depths of imagination and the heights of architecture.
Art, Not Fashion
While the installation celebrates the Artycapucines VII collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Murakami, the focus shifts away from fashion to the poetic language of space.
The artist’s characters — from Mr. DOB to the Smiling Flowers — make subtle appearances, yet the real protagonist is the environment itself: immersive, radiant, and alive.
Louis Vuitton’s partnership with Murakami, which began in 2003, continues to expand the boundaries between art and design. At Art Basel Paris, this alliance reaches a new dimension — where craftsmanship serves imagination, and an artwork becomes an experience to inhabit.
A Living Work of Art
Under the shimmering dome of the Grand Palais, Takashi Murakami’s octopus is both monument and mirage — a living sculpture that invites reflection on the beauty of transformation.
Between light and shadow, myth and modernity, it captures the essence of artistic collaboration: the power to make the impossible seem alive.
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Photos: Art Basel Paris 2025 © Adrien Dirand - Louis Vuitton Malletier
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