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Lot Essay
Painted in 2000, Nara's All the World Is Yours shows a beguiling yet defiant little girl alone on the canvas. The solitary figure is a constant in Nara's work, blending the iconic simplicity of a single motif with an existential weight heightened by the expressions on his characters' faces. The girl in All the World Is Yours is almost sweet, but the scowl on her face ensures that the viewer takes nothing at face value. This picture may be half way between the Floating World of Ukiyo-e and Pop Art, but there is an ominous mood here that also places it firmly between Winnie the Pooh and Ringu. Capturing an all-too-believable unruliness in the girl's features, Nara presents an image of childhood with its mixture of innocence and rebellion that is frank and honest, avoiding saccharine or idealised nostalgia.
Nara is frank in his admissions as to the eclecticism of his influences. His images have an engagingly sweet quality that verges on the kitsch, yet are always tinted by a hint of the Surreal. In All the World Is Yours this is in the strange glare on the girl's face. Nara's art is very much the product of our age, of a Japan that retains its own culture and traditions while often celebrating the consumer iconography of the West, be it in the form of labels, logos or pop stars: 'Fortunately nowadays it's no longer forbidden to be into kitsch and kid's stuff, and only people who want to be 'very' grown up can't relate to such things' (Nara, quoted in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, exh. cat., Munich 2002, p. 105). Nara blends together artistic tradition, cinema, manga, Disney and the advertising age, condensing them into an enchanting army of characters who paradoxically mix urbanity with a big-eyed, beguiling puppy-dog innocence.
Nara is frank in his admissions as to the eclecticism of his influences. His images have an engagingly sweet quality that verges on the kitsch, yet are always tinted by a hint of the Surreal. In All the World Is Yours this is in the strange glare on the girl's face. Nara's art is very much the product of our age, of a Japan that retains its own culture and traditions while often celebrating the consumer iconography of the West, be it in the form of labels, logos or pop stars: 'Fortunately nowadays it's no longer forbidden to be into kitsch and kid's stuff, and only people who want to be 'very' grown up can't relate to such things' (Nara, quoted in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, exh. cat., Munich 2002, p. 105). Nara blends together artistic tradition, cinema, manga, Disney and the advertising age, condensing them into an enchanting army of characters who paradoxically mix urbanity with a big-eyed, beguiling puppy-dog innocence.