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Lot Essay
As one of the leading artists of the influential Tokyo Pop movement of the 1990s, Yoshitomo Nara is best known for his uniquely stylised paintings, sculptures, and installations of cute, wide-eyed, pastel-hued children and animals. Like many of his contemporaries such as Takashi Murakami, Nara belongs to a generation who grew up during the economic boom in Japan, a time when Western pop culture pervaded the country with Walt Disney animation, comic books and Western rock music. Nara's upbringing during this time profoundly affected his mindset and his artwork touches upon the sensibilities of alienation and rebellion experienced by youths worldwide.
Famous for his punk cartoon-like cast of girls who he dubbed as "Ramonas", Untitled (Lot 64), 2007, is an homage to Nara's favorite punk band The Ramonas, who inspired him with their rebellious spirit and brazen punk rock ethos. Painted in acrylic on canvas laid on fibreglass disc, Nara's signature Ramona, whose hairstyle resembles those sported by some of The Ramones during the 1970s, appears as though lifted from children's books or Japanese manga comics. The young girl before us, her gaze indignant and her jaw clenched in defiance, solitary in her own world, embodies both innocence and enmity. She is an enigmatic character; seemingly amiable and unaffected, her eyes suggest an emotional complexity contrary to her sweet appearance. Her big eyes twinkle like galaxies but, at the same time, seem to be awash with existential melancholy and rebellious liberation.
Nara shows deliberate restraint in Untitled, leaving the background devoid of any extraneous features that would distract us from the young girl. The floating "Ramona" against the empty textured background is an ironic play on one of Nara's stylistic sources: ukiyo-e paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries. Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) originally depicted the mundane or floating world of leisure. The exaggerated facial features, especially the wide eyes, are very similar to the style of Toshusai Sharaku's ukiyo-e prints. Stylistically, Nara is consistent in using the flat colours, clean lines and cropped compositions found in ukiyo-e and its present-day incarnation of manga comic books.
Along with Takashi Murakami, Nara represents part of a new wave of Pop aesthetic in Japanese art that challenges the tradition of figurative painting. Whereas Murakami's works reconsider traditional values in Japanese aesthetics within the postmodern trope of manga and anime, Nara distances himself from these influences."I don't dislike manga, but I'm not interested in it, and I don't watch anime at all," he says. Rather, his work references the children's books of his youth that he himself cites as one of his main influences, books such as Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupry, or the illustrations of Japanese painter Takeshi Motai in the 1950s: "I'm much more influenced by picture books, children's books with picturesKIn 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's work crosses the boundaries between traditional fine art and popular culture, and his typical subversion of wide-eyed children, staring out at viewers from an empty canvas epitomises the Japanese concept of Kawaii, or cute aesthetic. It assembles fragments of childhood memory, cultural images, punk music and elements of contemporary life to create an emotive picture that arouses the imagination and empathy of the viewer.
Famous for his punk cartoon-like cast of girls who he dubbed as "Ramonas", Untitled (Lot 64), 2007, is an homage to Nara's favorite punk band The Ramonas, who inspired him with their rebellious spirit and brazen punk rock ethos. Painted in acrylic on canvas laid on fibreglass disc, Nara's signature Ramona, whose hairstyle resembles those sported by some of The Ramones during the 1970s, appears as though lifted from children's books or Japanese manga comics. The young girl before us, her gaze indignant and her jaw clenched in defiance, solitary in her own world, embodies both innocence and enmity. She is an enigmatic character; seemingly amiable and unaffected, her eyes suggest an emotional complexity contrary to her sweet appearance. Her big eyes twinkle like galaxies but, at the same time, seem to be awash with existential melancholy and rebellious liberation.
Nara shows deliberate restraint in Untitled, leaving the background devoid of any extraneous features that would distract us from the young girl. The floating "Ramona" against the empty textured background is an ironic play on one of Nara's stylistic sources: ukiyo-e paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries. Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) originally depicted the mundane or floating world of leisure. The exaggerated facial features, especially the wide eyes, are very similar to the style of Toshusai Sharaku's ukiyo-e prints. Stylistically, Nara is consistent in using the flat colours, clean lines and cropped compositions found in ukiyo-e and its present-day incarnation of manga comic books.
Along with Takashi Murakami, Nara represents part of a new wave of Pop aesthetic in Japanese art that challenges the tradition of figurative painting. Whereas Murakami's works reconsider traditional values in Japanese aesthetics within the postmodern trope of manga and anime, Nara distances himself from these influences."I don't dislike manga, but I'm not interested in it, and I don't watch anime at all," he says. Rather, his work references the children's books of his youth that he himself cites as one of his main influences, books such as Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupry, or the illustrations of Japanese painter Takeshi Motai in the 1950s: "I'm much more influenced by picture books, children's books with picturesKIn 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's work crosses the boundaries between traditional fine art and popular culture, and his typical subversion of wide-eyed children, staring out at viewers from an empty canvas epitomises the Japanese concept of Kawaii, or cute aesthetic. It assembles fragments of childhood memory, cultural images, punk music and elements of contemporary life to create an emotive picture that arouses the imagination and empathy of the viewer.