Three thousand pairs are on standby for public use when the exhibition opens. Only the artist’s silver footwear, wiped on a paper towel beforehand, is allowed to tread upon its surface.

“Am a little bit down,” he continues. “Sorry. This is my character. In interviews, [the] artist is not an actor.”

With Murakami, 57, a glum seam tends to run through the apparently glittery proceedings. The last time we’d met, in September 2018 when he had a Gagosian show in Hong Kong, he’d insisted he’d done nothing new for a decade; at one point, he’d announced he was choking and made gestures of self-strangulation.

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“It’s about his struggle,” says Tobias Berger, head of art at Tai Kwun, who co-curated the exhibition with Gunnar B. Kvaran, director of Astrup Fearnley Museet, in Oslo, Norway, where a version was shown in 2017.

Then, the title was “Murakami by Murakami”. Berger tweaked it. The substitution of the two letters “by” with the two adversarial letters “vs” cleverly suggests not just the internal boxing-match of the artist but also Tai Kwun’s colonial – and legal – history as a former police station, magistracy and prison.

The dual reference matters because this exhibition marks the first anniversary of Tai Kwun – which means “big station” in Cantonese – and is, therefore, a big deal. When Tai Kwun Contemporary opened, so Berger says, “I expected, oh, I don’t know, 10,000 or 20,000 visitors? But we have 10,000 a week.”

Now Berger’s mounted what he believes is the largest exhibition of a living artist ever held in Hong Kong and what he describes as Murakami’s “first institutional-exhibition in China”.

The combination of already-high visitor numbers, plus Murakami’s fame, has prompted a rethink on footfall that goes beyond cloth slippers. The result is an entrance fee: HK$75 on the door, HK$60 if you book online and select a time slot.

Being funded by the Jockey Club, Tai Kwun is a non-profit organisation, so the money will offset the considerable costs of the show. “But the main reason is crowd control,” says Berger. “If I don’t have time slots, on Sundays the queues will be all around the building.”

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For Murakami, the building is a key part of the attraction. He loves its architects, Herzog & de Meuron, and he embraced the 1,500m (4,900-foot) space with enthusiasm. Right up to opening week, his team was sending work from Tokyo. (“I’d get a call from [Murakami’s people] and say, ‘Are you freaking kidding me?” says Berger, concerned about his budget. “They’d say they’d take care of it.”)

All the galleries, and some of the corridors, are filled with Murakami flowers, with Murakami sculptures, with Murakami sketches, with Murakami animation, with Murakami-as-Francis Bacon paintings.

For the first time in any Murakami exhibition, there’s a display of Murakami’s cosplay outfits. Even the room featuring some of the artist’s extensive art collection is a kind of visual-palate cleanser that feeds back into the Murakami mindset.

Perhaps the most intriguing works on display are what are sometimes referred to as his “excuse” paintings. A few years ago when the artist couldn’t meet gallery deadlines he began painting apologies, the art-world equivalent of a “sorry note” to teacher. These have morphed into an entirely separate genre of autobiography.

In the Hong Kong show, for instance, he paint-writes about his desire to create nightmares that are then misinterpreted (“the audience reaction has been that it’s cute and Instagrammable”); online criticism of his 100-strong team (“all you do in the end is work your assistants to the bone while you idly nap”); dismisses the Japanese art scene (“a hotbed of people who remain in a state of idiocy”); analyses his compulsion to collect art (“I have since become a mere good-for-nothing collection addict wasting company money”); and underlines his toil for this show (“the exhibition will have a backdrop filled with agony – sigh”).

But what prompted such confessions? After a short exchange with his interpreter about the word “confession”, he says, “It’s a stupid diary”.

It turns out that Murakami, who has worked with Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, has been inspired by hip hop.

“Right now, for example – Drake,” he says and unexpectedly launches into an imitation: “I have a scandal! I have a baby! I have a night with the whores!” A little later, he pretends to be Paris Hilton: “I’m gorgeous! I’m glamorous! I’m rich!” This is intended as a disapproving contrast. The process is about self-abasement, not boasting.

“Social media is a fake thing,” he continues. “People must be honest.” No secrets then? “No.” Then, quickly, “Yes! Maybe embarrassing things – something sexual. Not in a museum!”

Strictly speaking, Tai Kwun Contemporary isn’t a museum – it describes itself as “an art centre” with “museum-standard galleries” – but, to Murakami, it’s an appropriate place to unveil himself. A commercial gallery, he says, “is a very private theatre”, but a museum “is an opera house; [it’s] already a very dramatic setting for the emotional thing”.

What does he think of the title? “Honestly, I’m a bit tired of using the Murakami name in [the] title. But it’s very catchy, [and the] audience understand.” On the other hand – and maybe this is further evidence of the internal tussle – when Berger decided to include costumes in the show, Murakami paid a “huge amount of money” to have mannequins moulded in his own image. “I want to make it much more dramatic.”

Berger, incidentally, features in the hip-hop-diary works. Murakami paint-writes that the curator’s father was well-known in Wiesbaden, Germany “for collecting and exhibiting peculiar items” and “I surmise that growing up, Tobias had complex feelings about his father’s collection”. Asked about this, Berger begins laughing but declines to elaborate. Murakami says, “His father had a very stupid collection. So he and I can travel together.”

As it happens, it was a German painter called Horst Janssen whose work, on display in Tokyo’s Isetan department store in 1979, triggered within Murakami the urge to paint. He’d cried, helplessly, in front of it.

The last time his own work made him weep, he says, was a couple of years ago when he was making an animation storyboard for a song called Let’s Go See The Nuclear Reactor. (Before 2011, it was Hiroshima that lurked in his work; now it’s the Fukushima disaster.)

“Maybe, again, I will cry,” he says. “Excitement is very important. But at the end of project, I never want to see it.”

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In another one of the show’s writing-paintings, he confesses, “I don’t really know why my works are being received so well. Ah, life is so ironic … I lament my lack of talent.”

Reminded of his choking comment at Gagosian last year, he simply says, “I was fat!” For the Tai Kwun show, he has been on a diet, fasting 18 hours a day. He finds it helps his concentration and – it turns out – it also explains this morning’s particular gloom. The previous night, he’d had a beetroot salad and it had a startling sanguine effect on his urine. So he’d arrived at the interview, upon the skull-carpet, in the grip of a health fear.

On the day of the exhibition opening, there’s still a queue to get in, despite the allotted ticket time slots. It’s for the Murakami shop and it stretches past the large silver figures of his brand mascots, Kaikai and Kiki – cute but fanged – in the Prison Yard.

The last time Murakami created outdoor sculptures was for his Versailles exhibition in 2010. Now he’s back in Asia and the crowds are coming.

“Murakami vs Murakami” continues at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central until 1 September 2019. www.taikwun.hk/murakami