Along with his contemporary Takashi Murakami, Nara finds inspiration in traditional Japanese figurative works while simultaneously diverging from them. Together, Nara and Murakami provoked new developments in the Japanese Pop Art movement. While Murakami mined the depths of anime, manga, and other popular Japanese media, Nara looked to different influences in order to develop his personal style. Though many have drawn parallels between Nara’s characters and Japanese Pop, the artist maintains, “Honestly, I have been more influenced by children’s books… I don’t dislike manga, but I’m not interested in it, and I don’t watch anime at all” (Y. Nara, quoted in M. Chiu, Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat., New York, Asia Society, 2010, pp. 174-175). Instead, the artist credits his childhood as the greatest impact on his artistic production. Having grown up in a post-war Japan inundated with Western influence, Nara gravitated toward the counter-cultural, defiant strains of rock and punk music, puncturing his oeuvre with references to his interest in the genre. By including elements from both the Western and Eastern worlds, Nara combines these dichotomous sensibilities into a thought-provoking and deeply personal style.
As a teenager, the artist was introduced to mainstream rock and roll, as well as songs from independent labels. Recalling the first time he heard a song by the Ramones, Nara said, “One such night, one song that played from the radio blew my mind… My whole precocious self was blown away! 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” (Y. Nara, quoted in M. Chiu, Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat., New York, Asia Society, 2010, p. 258). This revelation from his youth certainly impacted both the formal and thematic qualities of the present lot and music still remains an important aspect of the artist’s life.

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