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拍品专文
Looking up at us with doe-eyes that owe more to animation than to the canon of the artistic tradition, the child in this picture has a surly look on her face. Her fists appear clenched. She appears to be wilful. Painted in 1993, The Mirage of the Heavenly Child Appears in Front of the Rusty Cockpit shows one of the characters from the whimsical world of Nara. This is a world of memory and imagination. The child has an expression that seems all too real, and yet has been rendered in a comic-strip manner recalling manga and Disney. In this way, Nara's painting recalls the artist's own childhood, and the characters from books and television that occupied his life. And yet with that look on her face, there is a jolt of reality, a hint of genuine human disgruntlement that may also owe its existence to the days of Nara's youth.
The characters in Nara's paintings engage us with their huge eyes, and this is made all the more effective by the sheer scale of this painting, a manner that deliberately relates to popular culture. Nara's art comes from and is intended for the world of the everyday, the world to which anyone, not only the cognoscenti, can relate. They embrace the realms of kitsch and Hello Kitty that form a visual backdrop to so many of our lives. Discussing this democratic and inclusive approach to both his influences and his intended viewers, Nara has explained that, "Children from all over the world, from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe, all like Disney characters; I would rather be someone like Disney than an 'artist.' The notion of 'artist,' or what we understand it to mean, isn't important to me. I never had the intention to become an artist; I just always wanted to make art" (Nara, quoted in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, exh. cat., Munich, 2002, p. 105).
The characters in Nara's paintings engage us with their huge eyes, and this is made all the more effective by the sheer scale of this painting, a manner that deliberately relates to popular culture. Nara's art comes from and is intended for the world of the everyday, the world to which anyone, not only the cognoscenti, can relate. They embrace the realms of kitsch and Hello Kitty that form a visual backdrop to so many of our lives. Discussing this democratic and inclusive approach to both his influences and his intended viewers, Nara has explained that, "Children from all over the world, from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe, all like Disney characters; I would rather be someone like Disney than an 'artist.' The notion of 'artist,' or what we understand it to mean, isn't important to me. I never had the intention to become an artist; I just always wanted to make art" (Nara, quoted in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, exh. cat., Munich, 2002, p. 105).