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Lot Essay
Painted in 2004, Yoshitomo Nara's Nowhere Land/Milky Sea shows the floating head of a young girl, painted on a disc that is almost two metres in diameter. The sheer scale means that this disembodied head floats like a vast, comical cipher, looking out from the textured picture surface with eyes that resemble galaxies. This is one of the earliest works in which Nara has rendered the protagonist's eyes like cosmic mandalas, with elliptical rings of colour and stellar trails emanating from the mystical light of the glowing yellow pupils.
In Nowhere Land/Milky Sea, Nara has shown a deliberate restraint, leaving the background without any extraneous features that would distract us from the head of the young girl who looks out with such a set jaw, or from her piercing, meticulously-painted eyes with their hypnotic swirls and eddies of paint and the nebula-like areas of colour within them. This picture explores Nara's most idiosyncratic subject matter, young children painted in an almost cartoonish manner, influenced by his exposure both to the Japanese culture of his homeland and to the Western art about which he learnt more and more during his time as a student in Europe. This is highlighted by Nara's deliberate emphasis on the activity and medium of painting through the incredibly textured surface of the circular support, which comprises the addition of many bandage-like patches of canvas upon which the image has been painted. Crucially, this emphasises Nara's distance from the concepts of the Superflat espoused by fellow Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, while also adding a tactile, sensory quality to this imposing image.
In Nowhere Land/Milky Sea, perhaps inspired by his own use of sculpture, Nara has used shading and modelling to give the head a sense of plasticity, of three-dimensionality, further distancing the picture from the world of manga with which his work is often associated and perhaps referencing the children's books of his youth that he himself cites as one of his main influences. 'People often say "Oh his work is influenced by manga and by animation" but this is really not true,' Nara himself has explained in terms that clearly relate to Nowhere Land/Milky Sea. 'I'm much more influenced by picture books, children's books with pictures... In a picture book you have a single image that can contain an entire narrative and I think this is a style of visual story telling that I have really learned a lot from and have been influenced by' (Nara, quoted in N. Hegert, 'Interview with Yoshitomo Nara', ArtSlant New York, September 2010, reproduced at www.artslant.com).
Nara's incredible depiction of emotions, sometimes incongruous, in his subjects has led to a widespread fascination with his art, which has graced books and album covers as well as other media. In Nowhere Land/Milky Sea, the facial expression of the girl has a determination that appears at odds with her implied age; this allows Nara to invite his viewers to project themselves onto the image, to recall the intensity of the feelings of childhood, while the eyes hint at the inherent wisdom of that more innocent age. Nara has often based his pictures on his own remembered experiences. At the same time, Nara uses disconnects such as that between this portrait of rigid determination and the usual depictions of girls of this age in order to introduce a hint of the uncanny. Nara is revealing his own wryly subversive activity by depicting the stubborn rebellion of this supposedly cutesy girl. It may be no coincidence that her hairstyle resembles those sported by some of the Ramones during the 1970s, anti-establishment figures who had a huge influence on Nara and the vocation he selected.
In Nowhere Land/Milky Sea, Nara has shown a deliberate restraint, leaving the background without any extraneous features that would distract us from the head of the young girl who looks out with such a set jaw, or from her piercing, meticulously-painted eyes with their hypnotic swirls and eddies of paint and the nebula-like areas of colour within them. This picture explores Nara's most idiosyncratic subject matter, young children painted in an almost cartoonish manner, influenced by his exposure both to the Japanese culture of his homeland and to the Western art about which he learnt more and more during his time as a student in Europe. This is highlighted by Nara's deliberate emphasis on the activity and medium of painting through the incredibly textured surface of the circular support, which comprises the addition of many bandage-like patches of canvas upon which the image has been painted. Crucially, this emphasises Nara's distance from the concepts of the Superflat espoused by fellow Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, while also adding a tactile, sensory quality to this imposing image.
In Nowhere Land/Milky Sea, perhaps inspired by his own use of sculpture, Nara has used shading and modelling to give the head a sense of plasticity, of three-dimensionality, further distancing the picture from the world of manga with which his work is often associated and perhaps referencing the children's books of his youth that he himself cites as one of his main influences. 'People often say "Oh his work is influenced by manga and by animation" but this is really not true,' Nara himself has explained in terms that clearly relate to Nowhere Land/Milky Sea. 'I'm much more influenced by picture books, children's books with pictures... In a picture book you have a single image that can contain an entire narrative and I think this is a style of visual story telling that I have really learned a lot from and have been influenced by' (Nara, quoted in N. Hegert, 'Interview with Yoshitomo Nara', ArtSlant New York, September 2010, reproduced at www.artslant.com).
Nara's incredible depiction of emotions, sometimes incongruous, in his subjects has led to a widespread fascination with his art, which has graced books and album covers as well as other media. In Nowhere Land/Milky Sea, the facial expression of the girl has a determination that appears at odds with her implied age; this allows Nara to invite his viewers to project themselves onto the image, to recall the intensity of the feelings of childhood, while the eyes hint at the inherent wisdom of that more innocent age. Nara has often based his pictures on his own remembered experiences. At the same time, Nara uses disconnects such as that between this portrait of rigid determination and the usual depictions of girls of this age in order to introduce a hint of the uncanny. Nara is revealing his own wryly subversive activity by depicting the stubborn rebellion of this supposedly cutesy girl. It may be no coincidence that her hairstyle resembles those sported by some of the Ramones during the 1970s, anti-establishment figures who had a huge influence on Nara and the vocation he selected.