Famous Japanese artist, Yoshitomo Nara, in front of one of his pieces of art.
Yoshitomo Nara first came into the public eye in the 1990s with his deceptively simple paintings, prints, and drawings executed in his trademark, cartoonlike style. Since then, he has successfully established his reputation as one of the most sought-after artists alive today.
Nara’s popularity is clear to see in the prices his work fetches at auction; his most expensive painting to date sold for £17.57 million in October 2019, and his prints (which account for 39% of his work sold at auction) tend to fetch between £1,000 and £5,000, though a significant number have sold for up to £50,000.
Nara is a fairly private man, though he has spoken occasionally about how his childhood and other personal experiences have shaped his artwork; below is a list of five things you might not have known about Yoshitomo Nara.
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Music Is Very Important To Him
Yoshitomo Nara has spoken fairly openly about how influential music and album covers have been to him, especially in his early life. The artist was a fairly lonely child, and many of the children who appear in his prints (such as in Balance Girl) are shown as isolated, alone, upset, or angry. Nara said he found solace in music, stating that he learned about “deep empathy” from “contemplative folk singers”, before “the punk rockers schooled [him] in explosive expression.”
Because Nara grew up in “a rural area where there were no museums”, music also provided him with his “very first art experience” by means of the artwork on album covers. The artist’s website states “he has been greatly influenced by the music he began listening to at 9 years old”, as even though it was often in a foreign language, “he recreated the landscape of the music within himself using the record jackets.”
His Most Expensive Prints Sold For Over £445,000
Dating from 2010, Yoshitomo Nara’s set of 10 prints were sold by Christie’s in July 2022 for £445,704, more than £20,000 over their top estimate. The prints are titled Life Is Only One/My Little Treasure/I Don’t Want To Grow Up/Gypsy Song/Don’t Wanna Cry/Walk On/Poindexter/1-2-3-4 Pissed Off!/Hateful Christmas/S.O.S. Their titles show how Nara’s work may appear superficially simple and childlike, but it usually contains a more complex underlying message.
Set of 10 Prints sold by Christie’s in 2022
He Lived In Germany
In 1988, Nara moved to Germany to study art, though he claims he chose the country “just by chance”, and he ended up in Düsseldorf. Nara said he became profoundly lonely during this time, and it reminded him of his “lonely childhood.” He believes “the inadequacy of the outer world enriched [his] inner world”, and he tuned into how he’d felt as a child in Japan. As a result, what he drew “changed drastically.”
Nara’s extremely unique, individual style (seen in prints such as In the Floating World) developed as a result of the time he spent alone in Germany; as he said, “I needed a setting which would allow me to isolate myself from others… I found my style only after living in solitude. I couldn’t have achieved my style without a good setting.”
He’s Inspired By Ukyio-e
Yoshitomo Nara’s art is influenced both by artistic traditions and contemporary culture such as cartoons. His artistic education gave him a good grounding in different movements, styles, and techniques, including ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Japan’s Edo period. Nara has incorporated several elements of ukiyo-e (literally meaning “pictures of the floating world”) in his own work, for instance by using flat planes of colour, and by mixing text and images. Some of his pieces (such as the In the Floating World prints) are even reworkings of well-known ukiyo-e prints by masters like Hiroshige, allowing Nara to merge artistic tradition with contemporary issues.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai – A master of the Ukyio-e style
He Was Deeply Affected By Fukushima
Yoshitomo Nara grew up in Aomori, not far from Fukushima. In 2011, Japan experienced its most powerful earthquake ever recorded, which resulted in an intense tsunami. In turn, this caused the Fukushima nuclear accident. In total, over 20,000 people were killed or injured, huge numbers of buildings were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands had to quickly evacuate their homes.
The effects of the disaster were felt for many years to come, and Yoshitomo Nara has spoken openly about how profoundly affected he was by it. As the artist said, “the whole scenery I was familiar with has been destroyed… I know people who were lost. I was quite depressed and unstable for quite some time, but then I saw people from that devastated area starting to come back, and they started again.”
His own art was affected, too; he struggled to create anything in 2011, and what he subsequently produced contain clear echoes of the disaster (one print from just a year later, for instance, shows an unsmiling girl with an eyepatch bandaged over one eye). As Nara said, “Since the day of the great earthquake, something inside of me changed… I could no longer affirm the art that I had, perhaps, too easily believed in. I am sure that the loss and helplessness I felt was shared by everyone in Japan.”
