Contemporary Japanese artist, Yoshitomo Nara, pictured in a re-creation of his studio during a 2012 exhibition.
Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist commonly associated with the Superflat movement. He rose to prominence in Japan in the 1990s with his deceptively simple, cartoonlike images which tend to have darker undercurrents, and he has gained a significant following in recent years.
Nara’s work regularly fetches astronomically high prices. Primarily considered a painter, Nara’s most expensive painting to date was sold in October 2019 for £17.57 million. He’s also made forays into sculpting and printmaking, with prints accounting for 39% of his work sold at auction, where they usually fetch between £1,000 and £5,000, with a significant proportion reaching up to £50,000.
Below is a list of Yoshitomo Nara’s five most expensive prints sold at auction. If you own a Yoshitomo Nara print and would like to know more about how much it may be worth, or how to sell it, get in touch with Mark Littler today.
Free Specialist Print Valuations
Please use the form below to submit images of your print and receive a free, no-obligation valuation from a specialist auctioneer. We will also actively seek the highest offer from our network of private collectors to help you sell your print.
"*" indicates required fields
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.
This complete set of 10 ukiyo-e woodcuts has undoubtedly established its place among Yoshitomo Nara’s most popular work, currently accounting for his five most expensive sales in the prints category at auction. This particular set was sold by Christie’s in July 2022 for an extraordinary £445,704, more than £20,000 over its top estimate.
As is common for Nara, the figures have been rendered in a cartoonlike, almost childish style which is reminiscent of manga and anime (though the artist has never cited these as being influential to his artwork). Yet, the prints also contain an underlying complexity, with some bearing messages such as “I don’t want to grow up” and “Life is only one!”
Set of 10 Prints sold by Christie’s in 2022
In The Floating World
Yoshitomo Nara’s nationality and educational background in the arts mean he is well-acquainted with ukiyo-e, a style of woodblock prints which flourished during Japan’s Edo period (usually considered as dating from 1603 to 1868). Ukiyo-e literally means “pictures of the floating world”, and Nara has seamlessly incorporated elements of it into his own practice, including in this series of prints from 1999 – just one year before he returned to Japan after 12 years abroad in Germany.
The prints were sold by Phillips & Poly in November 2021 for £183,152, and they are reworkings of original ukiyo-e masterpieces by the likes of Hiroshige and Sharaku. They vary hugely, from the humorous (accompanied by phrases such as “No fun!”), to the unsettling and the bizarre, right through to making serious comments about contemporary life and society via text such as “No nukes. Love and peace.”
In The Floating World sold by Phillips in 2021
Balance Girl (No. YNF5937)
Nara’s work tends to feature cartoon-like characters who usually look fairly childlike, with large heads and huge eyes that stare back at the viewer. Mostly, they appear superficially cute in a kawaii sense, but there is often a darker, more unsettling side to them.
This print from 2014 is no exception, featuring a wide-eyed girl standing on some scales and gazing out with a mixture of despair and loneliness. The print appears to be an empathetic comment on unhealthy cultural obsession, and it was sold by SBI Art Auction in January 2023 for £149,088.
Balance Girl (No. YNF5937) sold by SBI Auction in 2023
Y.N. (Self-Portrait)/Green Eyes/Night Walker/On The F-Word/Rainy Day/Become To Thinker/Stay Good/Straight Jacket/Spockie/Haze Day/Running Nose Brothers/Top Of The World
As is common for Nara, these prints feature a mixture of childlike figures who look, by turns, rebellious, upset, alone, angry, or malicious. The artist has described how, as a child, he was introverted and struggled to fit in socially, amusing himself instead with watching cartoons and drawing, or with listening to music. He reflected that “When you are a kid, you are too young to know you are lonely, sad, and upset… Now I know I was.” These feelings have undoubtedly shaped how many of the children in Nara’s artwork appear, including those in this set of 12 prints from 2002, which was sold by Phillips & Poly in June 2021 for £145,408.
Set of 12 Prints sold by Phillips in 2021
Untitled (Eye Patch)
This print was sold by SBI Art Auction in November 2018 for £98,730, more than £30,000 over its top estimate. It dates from 2012, just one year after the disastrous Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that subsequently caused the Fukushima nuclear accident, killing and injuring over 20,000 people, destroying vast amounts of infrastructure, and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate their homes.
In many ways, the unsmiling girl with the injured eye in this print was a reaction to the disaster, since Nara was profoundly affected by the events, having grown up in Aomori, which he described as “on the border of Fukushima.” In the artist’s own words, “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.”
Untitled (Eye Patch) sold by SBI Art Auction in 2018
