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Lot Essay
‘’It is as if I’m confirming my own sense of self—as I am speaking to myself as I paint the face…' ——Yoshitomo Nara
Executed in 2007, Untitled is one of the few largest canvases Yoshitomo Nara created at the point he rose to a game-changing art world phenomenon—it was a year after the artist debuted his legendary show Yoshitomo Nara + Graf: A-Z at his hometown Aomori that propelled his fan frenzy to the new height and cemented his global acclaim. It was taken place at a local brewery brickhouse and at the time recruited more than 13,000 volunteers to plan and produce the exhibition—the artist’s largest cultural jamming that testifies the synergies of Nara’s art and local community. The exhibition was later toured to multiple institutions, including KM21, The Hague (formerly the GEM Museum of Contemporary Art), and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, where the present work was featured. Collaborating with the architectural and design group graf, Nara initiated an unorthodox way of displaying and viewing his art—creating temporary wooden shelters within an exhibition space where his personal collectibles are shown alongside his works. Being part of debuting this revolutionary concept in Europe, Untitled was hung in one of these wooden temporary structures, inviting the viewer to step into Nara’s inner world filled with personal memory and sentiment.
Out of the nearly eight hundreds of paintings Nara created since 1990s, the present work was chosen by the artist for his artist’s book NARA 48 GIRLS. Portraying the iconic Nara’s ‘big-headed girl’ with only one eye revealed and sitting serenely behind a tabletop, Untitled is extremely rare in composition among the artist’s oeuvre. The girl, with her petal-like, perhaps Murakami-inspired collar, once appeared in an earlier work Nara co-created with Murakami at the dawn of the legendary Superflat movement; while her emerald green dress invokes some of the most quintessential and transcendent portraitures since Renaissance: from van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, The National Gallery, London) to Monet’s Woman in a Green Dress (1866, Kunsthalle Bremen) and Lempicka’s Young Lady in Green (1927-30, Centre Pompidou, Paris). It also appeared to be the colour worn by some of the most notable fictional characters invented by British playwright J.M. Barrie, such as Peter Pan and Tinker Bell. Never growing old, these fairies ring a bell with the good old memories of every grown-ups. Delving into fragments of childhood memories, Nara imbues the work with a fairy-tale milieu by reinventing a tender imagery that speaks simultaneously to himself as well as the whole generation.
Untitled also demonstrates a momentous transition of Nara’s visual lexicons—his changing course in depicting the eye from those piercingly slanted to lustrous star-studded, and his exhaustive and meticulous application of multi-layered pigments to create a luminous and enchanting emotional effect of portraiture. In Untitled, the enlarged pupil of the little star dweller almost engulfs the viewer with its mesmerising, kaleidoscopic blobs and dashes. Nara once asserted, ‘I used to draw them too carelessly. Say, to express the anger, I just drew some triangular eyes. I drew obviously angry eyes, projected my anger there, and somehow released my pent-up emotions. About ten years ago, however, I became more interested in expressing complex feelings in a more complex way’ (Y. Nara, quoted in Hideo Furukawa, ‘An interview with Yoshitomo Nara’, Asymptote Journal, November 2013).
Indeed, Nara’s shift of style in depicting the eye symbolises the new maturity of his painterly virtuosity in attaining what the art critic Midori Matsui described as ‘the allegorical ability to express narrative through singular image endowed with powerful emotional appeal and enigmatic fragment that evoked associations’ (M. Matsui, ‘A Child in the White Field: Yoshitomo Nara as a Great “Minor Artist”’, Yoshitomo Nara: The Complete Works, Paintings, Sculptures, Editions, Photographs, Vol. 1, Tokyo 2011, p. 334). In a similar vein as Lucian Freud’s early figurative paintings, Nara’s depiction of girl is nothing close to the ‘classical style’. Focusing on capturing the spirituality over the physicality of the character, both artists pay meticulous attention to the very details of eyes while softening other features of the face. This exceptional work, in particular, attests to his bravura in the medium and his meticulous attention to the minute difference in paint and brushwork, all of which highlight the clarity in the young girl’s deep yet lustrous—single eye. At once sparkling like stars in the night sky and inviting introspection like a window, it pulls the viewer into a spiritual realm that is timeless and constantly changing—a sacred temple of childhood that belongs to everyone.
The key to this enthralling effect is repeated painting until the pigment becomes one with the canvas. This creates a stark contrast to the surface-bound quality in his earlier works. His Wish World Peace from 2014 (Christie's Hong Kong, 26 May 2022, lot 51, sold for HKD 97,090,000), for example, demonstrates the persistent delicacy Nara holds towards his medium. In the past decade, Nara has slowed down and let the light and shadow come out in his work. These details turn his paintings into a meditative and reflexive whole that generates a profound feeling of immediacy. Earlier motifs such as cigarettes, knives, and torches are gone—instead, his paintings become pure poetic explorations of lines and colours charged with the most intense emotions. As Nara once expressed, ‘It allows me to draw out parts of myself that I’m not even aware are there' (Y. Nara, quoted in ‘Japanese artist has a taste for Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 9 March 2015).
Executed in 2007, Untitled is one of the few largest canvases Yoshitomo Nara created at the point he rose to a game-changing art world phenomenon—it was a year after the artist debuted his legendary show Yoshitomo Nara + Graf: A-Z at his hometown Aomori that propelled his fan frenzy to the new height and cemented his global acclaim. It was taken place at a local brewery brickhouse and at the time recruited more than 13,000 volunteers to plan and produce the exhibition—the artist’s largest cultural jamming that testifies the synergies of Nara’s art and local community. The exhibition was later toured to multiple institutions, including KM21, The Hague (formerly the GEM Museum of Contemporary Art), and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, where the present work was featured. Collaborating with the architectural and design group graf, Nara initiated an unorthodox way of displaying and viewing his art—creating temporary wooden shelters within an exhibition space where his personal collectibles are shown alongside his works. Being part of debuting this revolutionary concept in Europe, Untitled was hung in one of these wooden temporary structures, inviting the viewer to step into Nara’s inner world filled with personal memory and sentiment.
Out of the nearly eight hundreds of paintings Nara created since 1990s, the present work was chosen by the artist for his artist’s book NARA 48 GIRLS. Portraying the iconic Nara’s ‘big-headed girl’ with only one eye revealed and sitting serenely behind a tabletop, Untitled is extremely rare in composition among the artist’s oeuvre. The girl, with her petal-like, perhaps Murakami-inspired collar, once appeared in an earlier work Nara co-created with Murakami at the dawn of the legendary Superflat movement; while her emerald green dress invokes some of the most quintessential and transcendent portraitures since Renaissance: from van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, The National Gallery, London) to Monet’s Woman in a Green Dress (1866, Kunsthalle Bremen) and Lempicka’s Young Lady in Green (1927-30, Centre Pompidou, Paris). It also appeared to be the colour worn by some of the most notable fictional characters invented by British playwright J.M. Barrie, such as Peter Pan and Tinker Bell. Never growing old, these fairies ring a bell with the good old memories of every grown-ups. Delving into fragments of childhood memories, Nara imbues the work with a fairy-tale milieu by reinventing a tender imagery that speaks simultaneously to himself as well as the whole generation.
Untitled also demonstrates a momentous transition of Nara’s visual lexicons—his changing course in depicting the eye from those piercingly slanted to lustrous star-studded, and his exhaustive and meticulous application of multi-layered pigments to create a luminous and enchanting emotional effect of portraiture. In Untitled, the enlarged pupil of the little star dweller almost engulfs the viewer with its mesmerising, kaleidoscopic blobs and dashes. Nara once asserted, ‘I used to draw them too carelessly. Say, to express the anger, I just drew some triangular eyes. I drew obviously angry eyes, projected my anger there, and somehow released my pent-up emotions. About ten years ago, however, I became more interested in expressing complex feelings in a more complex way’ (Y. Nara, quoted in Hideo Furukawa, ‘An interview with Yoshitomo Nara’, Asymptote Journal, November 2013).
Indeed, Nara’s shift of style in depicting the eye symbolises the new maturity of his painterly virtuosity in attaining what the art critic Midori Matsui described as ‘the allegorical ability to express narrative through singular image endowed with powerful emotional appeal and enigmatic fragment that evoked associations’ (M. Matsui, ‘A Child in the White Field: Yoshitomo Nara as a Great “Minor Artist”’, Yoshitomo Nara: The Complete Works, Paintings, Sculptures, Editions, Photographs, Vol. 1, Tokyo 2011, p. 334). In a similar vein as Lucian Freud’s early figurative paintings, Nara’s depiction of girl is nothing close to the ‘classical style’. Focusing on capturing the spirituality over the physicality of the character, both artists pay meticulous attention to the very details of eyes while softening other features of the face. This exceptional work, in particular, attests to his bravura in the medium and his meticulous attention to the minute difference in paint and brushwork, all of which highlight the clarity in the young girl’s deep yet lustrous—single eye. At once sparkling like stars in the night sky and inviting introspection like a window, it pulls the viewer into a spiritual realm that is timeless and constantly changing—a sacred temple of childhood that belongs to everyone.
The key to this enthralling effect is repeated painting until the pigment becomes one with the canvas. This creates a stark contrast to the surface-bound quality in his earlier works. His Wish World Peace from 2014 (Christie's Hong Kong, 26 May 2022, lot 51, sold for HKD 97,090,000), for example, demonstrates the persistent delicacy Nara holds towards his medium. In the past decade, Nara has slowed down and let the light and shadow come out in his work. These details turn his paintings into a meditative and reflexive whole that generates a profound feeling of immediacy. Earlier motifs such as cigarettes, knives, and torches are gone—instead, his paintings become pure poetic explorations of lines and colours charged with the most intense emotions. As Nara once expressed, ‘It allows me to draw out parts of myself that I’m not even aware are there' (Y. Nara, quoted in ‘Japanese artist has a taste for Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 9 March 2015).