Yoshitomo Nara - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Wednesday, May 17, 2023 | Phillips
  • “Music certainly played a major role in the formation of me as an individual. The influence of music on me is far more significant than that of manga and other things that people talk about.”
    —Yoshitomo Nara

     

    A young girl in a blue dress snarls and shreds her guitar in Yoshitomo Nara’s Guitar Girl, 2019. The determined, yet strikingly cherubic figure epitomizes Nara’s classic type, the “Ramona” (named for the Ramones, a punk rock band, and sporting the group’s signature, shaggy hairstyle), a feisty character who embodies youthful rebellion and ferocious self-determination. Guitar Girl is a “symbolic representation of the dominant feelings of Japanese youth” in the early 21st century, “characterized by a sense of uncertainty about the future, vulnerability, and a yearning for the innocence [of childhood],” expressed through Nara’s playful interpretation of American rock and roll, and traditional and contemporary Japanese art.i

     

    As a child, Nara’s first exposure to art came through the album covers of his favorite records. “There was no museum where I grew up,” he said, so punk, folk, and rock records served as artistic inspiration.ii As a teenager a song “that played from the radio blew my mind… my whole precocious self was blown away!” he said. “That song lit a fire in my raw teenage emotion. It was the Ramones! And then the Sex Pistols, and The Clash, and Bob Marley… They gave me an answer to how I’d live my life from then on.”iii One can imagine Guitar Girl as a female avatar of Nara’s own teenaged self, listening to the Ramones’ guitar-heavy music on the radio, and practicing the riffs on her own.iv 

     

    The Ramones playing the Phase V club in New Jersey, 1976. Image: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

    Nara’s simplified, expressive characters, reminiscent of children’s book illustrations and cartoons, reveal how deeply the visuals from Nara’s childhood influence his work. However, the artist is quick to reject manga, anime, and kawaii culture as visual referents; the influence of music and illustration is much more meaningful, he said.v

     

    That is not to say, of course, that Nara’s work is not without Japanese visual antecedents. The rounded facial features of Guitar Girl harken back to traditional otafuku (or okame) theatrical masks. The otafuku mask, worn in Noh theater performances, represents the Goddess of Mirth, an ever-smiling, rosy cheeked woman, who brings good luck to the man she marries (the word otafuku literally meaning “much good fortune”).vi Nara applies otafuku facial features—round cheeks, upturned eyes, and small lips—to his Guitar Girl, but crucially, he transforms the Goddess of Mirth’s eternal grin into a ferocious snarl. Guitar Girl seems to bite her lip as she bares her teeth, an aggressive gesture that speaks to the counter-cultural edge of Nara’s work. This punk rock ethos is reflected in the Tokyo street style fashion photography of Nara’s contemporary, Shoichi Aoki, for FRUiTS magazine. Nara’s Guitar Girl, like Aoki’s teenage models, captures the stylish dissatisfaction and malaise of a generation of young Japanese people navigating the lasting effects of Western culture on Japan after World War II.vii

     

    [Left] Detail of performer (at left) wearing an otafuku mask, c. 1601-1604. Private Collection. Image: akg-images / Liszt Collection
    [Right] Shoichi Aoki, street fashion still from FRUiTS magazine, Issue 40, Sep. 23, 2000. Image: © Shoichi Aoki

    The combination of Western and Japanese references in Guitar Girl’s tough attitude places Nara’s work among that of his Japanese Pop peers, including Takashi Murakami and Chiho Aoshima. From 2001, Nara was associated with Murakami’s concept of SUPERFLAT, which interrogated the crux of post-War Japanese capitalism and traditional values.viii Like Murakami, Nara uses bright colors and flattened forms, but works like Guitar Girl, with their simplified backgrounds, place more focus on the temperament and interiority of his figures, rather than just their surface. Guitar Girl bares her fangs, daring the viewer to guess what she’ll do next.

     

     

    i Midori Matsui, “Art for Myself and Others: Yoshitomo Nara’s Popular Imagination,” in Melissa Chiu, et al., eds., Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat., Asia Society Museum, New York, 2010, p. 13.

    ii Yoshitomo Nara, quoted in Gareth Harris, “Interview: Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara,” Financial Times, Oct. 10, 2014, online.

    iii Nara, quoted in Chiu et al., 258.

    iv Matsui, p. 15.

    v Nara, quoted ibid., 174-175; 181.

    vi “Okame (otafuku) mask,” Folk Art Museum of Central Texas, accessed Apr. 16, 2023, online.

    vii Kyle MacNeill, “FRUiTS: a look back at the greatest Japanese street style hits,” THE FACE, May 25, 2022, online.

    viii Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, “Superflat,” Artnet, 2001, online.

    • Provenance

      Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Dallas Contemporary, Yoshitomo Nara: I Forgot Their Names and Often Can't Remember Their Faces but Remember Their Voices Well, March 20–August 22, 2021

    • Literature

      The Yoshitomo Nara Foundation, ed., Yoshitomo Nara. The Works: Online Catalogue Raisonné, 2011–ongoing, no. YNF6686, online (illustrated)
      "Exhibition Review: Yoshitomo Nara at the Dallas Contemporary," Danny With Love, August 14, 2021, online (Dallas Contemporary, 2021, installation view illustrated)

12

Guitar Girl

signed and dated "2019 Nara" on the reverse
acrylic on wood, in artist's frame
46 1/2 x 37 3/8 x 3 1/8 in. (118.1 x 94.9 x 7.9 cm)
Executed in 2019.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$2,000,000 - 3,000,000 

Sold for $2,480,000

Contact Specialist

Carolyn Mayer
Associate Specialist, Head of Evening Sale, New York
+1 212 940 1206
CMayer@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 17 May 2023