Since the beginning, DOB has been a unique alibi for Murakami and his talent for branding. The dada-like phrase “dobozite dobozite oshamanbe,” from silly gags found in early 1970s Japanese manga combined with the famous gag by comedian Toru Yuri, was conceived as a signboard and then condensed into the three-letter DOB to form a trademark pop character. With a large round O-shape face and ears bearing the Letters D or B, DOB straddles two sources of inspiration – the Sega mascot Sonic the Hedgehog and Doraemon, the intelligent and endearing Japanese cat-like robot from the future – yet its identity remains as evasive as the nonsensical phrase from which it was conceived. While DOB’s origins as a product of language rather than commodity imagery has been a site of investigation more recently, what is also at stake is how DOB symbolically operates as an agent of consumption in Murakami’s lexicon: [1] an anonymous and malleable icon produced as a marketable brand, and [2] and abstract and fleeting morphing like-form representative of our endless desire to consume.
M. Yoshitake, “The Meaning of the Nonsense of Excess,” ©Murakami, Los Angeles and New York, 2007, p.123-124
As Amada Cruz notes in her essay, DOB in the Land of Otaku, “DOB does not promote any product, except perhaps Murakami. DOB is a disengaged signifier, an ever changing symbol of all the other artificially constructed characters that sell merchandise.”(A. Cruz, “DOB in the Land of Otaku,” Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning, New York, 1999, p.17)
Broken into five chromatic canvases the present lot resembles the stylistic, dramatic and often fragmented paneling found in manga comic books. Each canvas features a series of fragmented and distorted Mr. DOB’s transformed from his usual cute, saccharine smiley and wholly innocent self into an unsettling, crazy multi-eyed character full of razor sharp teeth. This surrealist transformation highlights Mr. DOB’s, and ultimately Murakami’s often confounding, and sometimes ironic, antagonist/protagonist relationship with commercialized characters and consumer consumption. Mr. DOB’s monstrous transformation becomes a direct correlation to one’s own impulse towards excessive consumption and the resultant frenzy thereof when left unchecked and unrestrained.
Akin to the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland Mr. DOB is an intrinsically vexing character of youthful innocence confronted with malignant, cunning mischievousness. “It is this ‘cuteness’ as a panacea – or is it a placebo? – that Murakami plays with in his characters inspired by Japanese animation, comic, books and toy models, sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes in a smirking bully. With DOB…he feeds then subverts our expectations for their established identities through unconventional pairings, contortions of their form, or sinister mood shifts, reminding us that, in reality as well as fantasy, cute, sentimental playfulness can easily be turned into something quite different.”(D. Friis-Hansen, “About “Japan” Itself,” Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning, New York, 1999, p. 35)