A MASTER'S WORKS GIVE ART EMOTIONAL DEPTH

The Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara is among the most revered artists of his generation, best known for his portraits of a girl with piercing eyes. These ominous-looking figures have been widely exhibited worldwide.

So when an exhibition of his works in Shanghai was closed because of the pandemic just four days after it opened on March 5, it would have added to the despondency that many felt as COVID-19 cast its pall over the city.

The good news is that just as the city has opened up again, doors to the Yoshitomo Nara exhibition at Yuz Museum in Shanghai reopened on July 1.

It is the largest showcase of the Japanese artist in China, consisting of more than 800 paintings, sculptures, ceramic and works on paper, providing a comprehensive overview of Nara's prolific career spanning 37 years.

It is jointly organized by Yuz Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a highlight of the Art West Bund 2022 of Shanghai.

The exhibition was originally due to run from March 5 to Sept 4. Yuz Museum, a private institution on the West Bund, is working with overseas collectors and agencies to extend the contract for borrowed artworks appearing in the show.

"We want to extend the exhibition for as long as possible to ensure people can view it," says Sun Yuanchen, the museum's director of marketing and business development.

About 30,000 early bird tickets were sold before the show was forced to close on March 9, Sun says.

"We offered a refund, but most buyers decided to hold on to their tickets and wait until the epidemic was over."

The museum also adjusted its closing time to 9 pm so as to receive more visitors.

During the hiatus when Yuz was closed like all other cultural facilities in Shanghai, the museum opened an online shop selling merchandise linked to the Nara exhibition.

"We wanted to reach as many people as possible, so we set a limit for each person to buy no more than two items," Sun says. "Even though no merchandise could be shipped during the lockdown in April and May, the sales were beyond our expectations. The buyers are from all over the country."

The curator of the exhibition, Mika Yoshitake, who did not attend the opening in Shanghai because of the pandemic, says Nara's works reflect his raw encounters with his inner self, taking inspiration from a wide range of resources－memories of his childhood, music, literature, studying and living in Germany from 1988 to 2000, exploring his roots in Asia and the Russian island of Sakhalin, and modern art from Europe and Japan.

From a wall of album covers Nara began collecting as a teenager, to paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramic and installations, the exhibition reflects his career spanning more than 30 years, from 1987 to 2021, shining a light on his creative process and evolution of style and ideas.

One of the paintings, Emergency, created in 2013, depicts a girl taken away on a wheeled stretcher amid the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011 and the tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster that ensued.

"Nara lived only 70 kilometers from the epicenter and drove to the area near the disaster zone with his mother to deliver food and help those in need," Yoshitake wrote of the painting, which is "perhaps one of the artist's most personal images".

A recent creation on exhibition is Light Haze Days/Study, 2020, painted in June during the pandemic. Still depicting the recurrent subject of a little girl, he tried to search for a new stylistic direction. According to the curator, the expression on this painting "exudes a pensive warmth that differs from the distant introspective gaze of his previous portraits, signaling an emotional shift that is affected by the pandemic".

While Nara enjoys great popularity in the art market, as well as contemporary pop culture, he "is not a trendy artist, and the exhibition is more than just social media sensation", says Le Mengrong, a Shanghai art critic. Nara was a role model for many emerging Chinese artists, he says. The root of his success was "a kid who loves to paint, whose style happened to be popular with the audience", to "finding his inner voice, and capturing intricate colors of his mood".

Le is especially touched by the many works on paper.

"They are often small in scale, and created on random materials, such as the back of a used envelope, a torn-up cardboard box and a page on the notepad."

Standing in front of these paintings, one cannot help but feel the artist's passion for creativity and telling his true feelings with his painting brush.

"You see in these paintings the softest corners in his heart, his solitude, weakness, and scorn,"Le says. "The more intricate and trivial these emotions are, the bigger resonance they evoke in the viewer."

The publisher of the first biography of Yoshitomo Nara in Chinese, Chen Ken, founding director of the Shanghai publisher Insight Books, also talked of the strong emotional impact Nara's art had on him.

"I was struck by the powerful emotions in his paintings of a tearful doggy and grumpy girl, about 20 years ago. Nara has the intuition and bluntness of a child, incomparable to any other artist of our time."

About three years ago, Chen said,"I believed it was the time to make a summing-up for Nara and his art, and approached him about a biography.

"We set up the interviews with him and arranged his writings, recollections and narration to put together this book, so it came out simultaneously in Chinese and Japanese recently, just in time for the exhibition in Shanghai.

Insight Books has established a system working with international artists and architects.

"We interviewed Vietnam's top architect, Vo Trong Nghia, and had his biography published, and we were the first in the world to publish the work of the Russian comic artist Anton Gudim," Chen says.

If you go

Yoshitomo Nara

Open 1 pm-9 pm, Tue-Thur; 10 am-9 pm, Fri-Sun, closed on Monday, last entry no later than 8 pm. Yuz Museum, 35 Fenggu Road, Xuhui district, Shanghai; 021-6426-1901