The sequentially expanding fields of brightly coloured, cartoonish flowers in these prints reflect Takashi Murakami’s long-standing interest in manga and the creation of characters that can repeated extensively with minor variations. Simplified and stylised – a circular, open-grinned face with ‘cute’ manga-style eyes that are ringed with flattened, daisy-like petals – Murakami’s flowers have been a hallmark of his intersecting artistic and commercial work since 1998. For the artist, the character’s smile represents an ironic resignation to social repression, and the trauma of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Following a period of searching in the wake of Japan’s tsunami disaster of March 2011, Murakami developed an interest the narratives and iconography of Buddhism. By titling the prints with reference to the concept of Nirvana, he underscores the malleability of the flowers as a subject, suggesting that their reproducibility extends to a capacity to take on new meanings without any substantive change in form.