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Lot Essay
‘I look back on the 1990s with nostalgia, much like looking at old photographs of my younger self’ (Yoshitomo Nara)
Almost two metres in height, Haze Days (1998) is a luminous and unmistakable painting by Yoshitomo Nara. One of the artist’s iconic girls stands waist-deep in a pool, a bandage tied in a neat bow around her head. She wears a mint-green top with a single gold button. Narrowing her large, otherworldly eyes—irises black and pupils green—she meets our gaze with grumpy defiance. Foreground and background merge in a misty space of pale, pearlescent colour: subtle washes drift across the girl’s features, placing her amid the haze of the title. Impressed traces of pigment soften her eyes and mouth. The work exemplifies the unique presence of Nara’s solitary figure paintings, which radiate potent, enigmatic emotion through the most economical of means. It reveals the newly delicate palette and technique that the artist began to explore in the late 1990s, departing from the bolder, more graphic lines of his previous paintings. Nara was recently celebrated in a landmark retrospective that toured the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden and the Hayward Gallery, London from 2024 to 2025.
Haze Days dates from a watershed year for Nara. After graduating in 1993 from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—where his teachers included the artist A. R. Penck—he had moved to Cologne. He was able to work on a larger scale than ever before and painted prolifically, refining his visual language towards the standalone figures for which he is best known today. 1998 saw his first solo museum show at the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee: alongside his friend and contemporary Takashi Murakami, he was also invited by the artist Paul McCarthy to the University of California, Los Angeles as a visiting professor. That same year, 124 of Nara’s works were acquired by the preparatory committee for the Aomori Museum of Art, which would open near his Japanese hometown in 2006. These included the important painting Mumps (1996), whose bandage motif anticipates the present work. Nara lived in Cologne until 2000, when he returned to Japan to prepare for a major exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art.
Born in 1959 in Hirosaki, a traditional castle town in Japan’s rural Aomori Prefecture, Nara was awakened to art through music. He purchased his first single when he was only eight years old, and built his own radio, which allowed him to pick up broadcasts from a nearby US Air Force base. As he grew up, these record covers and foreign sounds—Janis Joplin, The Beatles, The Ramones—allowed him to imagine another world. He was also an avid reader, fascinated by Takeshi Motai’s dreamlike illustrations for the poems and fairytales of Kenji Miyazawa. Nara enrolled at Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 1979, and a few months later embarked on a formative backpacking trip through Europe, where he experienced musical subcultures and saw masterpieces of European art first hand. After graduating from Aichi University of the Arts in 1987, he moved to Düsseldorf to further his studies. It was in Germany—informed by his outsider’s perspective on Western traditions, his training in Japanese Modernism, the Pop-adjacent work of contemporaries such as Murakami and the vigour of German Neo-Expressionism—that his distinctive style took shape.
‘I think I was looking for a new form of expression through my own history,’ Nara reflected recently: ‘one that couldn’t be categorised as Japanese, Asian, or Western. When a painting emerged that became a symbol of Nara, I was very excited: This is an original!’ (Y. Nara quoted in D. Kothenschulte, ‘Die Wütenden Mädchen’, Monopol, November 2024, p. 45). Nara’s 1993 graduation show in Düsseldorf included the seminal painting The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991, San Francisco Museum of Art), which set out the emotive immediacy and playful menace that would come to characterise his famous ‘big-headed girls.’ These figures developed significantly during the Cologne years that followed. As he shed the narrative complication and heavy lines of his earlier work, Nara’s protagonists approached the distilled, enigmatic clarity of the girl in Haze Days, inhabiting spaces whose pastel tones conjured the early Renaissance frescoes he had admired in Italy.
Nara sees these characters as a form of self-portraiture, representing aspects of his mood, memories and experience. They emerge to the beat of a constant studio soundtrack that helps to stir his emotions. ‘When I paint, I always think that the canvas is like a mirror, and that I am reflected in it’, he explains. ‘By tracing myself, I create a picture. It just happens to take the form of a girl, or a dog, or an animal, and almost ninety percent of the time I think I’m drawing a self-portrait, and I’m interacting with it’ (Y. Nara quoted in M. Mishikawa, ‘The 5th TAKIFUJI Art Award Winner: Nara Yoshitomo’, Japan Traffic Culture Association, September 2017). The bandage seen in the present work recurs frequently in Nara’s paintings and drawings of this period, and refers to the compress worn by children with mumps—a common illness during the artist’s childhood. The girl’s frown implies she is in no need of our sympathy.
The figure in a puddle in is another leitmotif, appearing in key works such as In the Deepest Puddle II (1995, Takahashi Collection, Tokyo). ‘It’s a state of thinking’, Nara says of this position. ‘Not frozen in thought, but rather thinking about the next action … maybe’ (Y. Nara in conversation with Y. Ma, in Yoshitomo Nara, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 2025, p. 74). Unusually, he has identified a direct inspiration for the image in the cover for John Hiatt’s 1975 album Overcoats, which shows the musician partly submerged in a body of water. This record was included in a wall of vinyl LPs from Nara’s vast personal collection that was shown in his recent retrospective. In Haze Days, the pool heightens the painting’s liminal quality: the girl stands poised between one realm and another. She becomes an apt avatar for Nara’s practice as a whole, which merges outlooks drawn from different traditions, and whose forms—irresistibly relatable, and with a universal visual appeal—are ultimately born from a private and complex inner world.
Haze Days (1998)
Shigemi Takahashi, Chief Curator, Aomori Museum of Art
Out of a milky haze emerges the upper body of a child with a large head. Having waded through the shallows until the water reached their waist, the child suddenly pauses, turning to look back at the world behind. The child’s gaze is sharp, as though piercing every veil, and their small mouth is slightly open, as if about to speak.
Painted in 1998, Haze Days is a work by the internationally celebrated Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Born in 1959 in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, Nara moved to Germany in 1988 to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he was influenced by artists such as Michael Buthe and A. R. Penck, leading figures in the post-war German art scene. His paintings—characterised by familiar motifs rendered in stylised forms and bold outlines—succeed in conveying raw emotions such as anger and sorrow, resonating with viewers beyond the conventional boundaries of the art world.
In recent years, Nara’s international recognition has continued to grow. Over the past year, a retrospective exhibition showcasing a comprehensive selection of his early to more contemporary works travelled to The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, and The Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London. This past spring, he was also selected for TIME100: The Most Influential People of 2025, a prestigious recognition that drew widespread attention to the artist.
Nara’s distinct artistic language is perhaps best represented in works such as The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991) and Mumps (1996), depicting children with unusually large heads and sharp gazes, standing alone in vast, desolate spaces. He established this recognisable style during the early 1990s while studying in Germany, away from his homeland.
In the early period of his time in Germany, unable to speak the language and knowing very few locals, Nara spent much of his time alone in the attic of his Düsseldorf apartment. He later described these solitary days as a period of intense self-confrontation, recalling his childhood spent alone at home while his parents were at work. His days in Germany, so reminiscent of his youth, became an opportunity to reawaken the childlike sensibility dormant within him. This experience of solitude played a major role in deepening his oeuvre.
Nara’s visual language resonates with the art movements of the 1980s and 1990s that transcended the boundaries between fine art and popular culture, while also actively incorporating elements of mass media. Simultaneously, his work also represents a deeply personal form of expression—one that he arrived at through a deep exploration of his own inner world while living in a foreign and solitary milieu.
Haze Days is an exceptionally accomplished work, rendered with refined brushwork and colour. Painted during his years in Germany, the piece exemplifies Nara’s exploration of the solitary child with an oversized head and piercing eyes, standing alone in a vast, misty space. The light, softly diffused through the haze, delicately envelops the fragile child’s body, accentuating their presence and evoking the work’s title. First seen in Mumps (1996), the motif of bandages reappears in this work. The bandages wrapping the cheeks of the child allude symbolically both to the hazy, fever-induced state of consciousness as well as the pain lurking within.
Meant to symbolise the ‘boundary’ connecting different worlds, the puddle around the child’s waist is a recurring motif in Nara’s work, exemplified in early paintings such as Pandora’s Box (1990) and In the Deepest Puddle II (1995). Standing between this world and the next, the child casts a sharp gaze back at the world left behind—a gaze of anger and protest directed at those indifferent to their pain or profound loneliness.
In 1998, in the same year this work was conceived, Nara wrote a poem titled ‘A Deep, Deep Puddle’.
A Deep, Deep Puddle
I don’t know where I am
How did I get to this place
Shallow waters as far as the eye can see
The sunlight shimmers on the surface
I walk slowly wading through the water
A few scattered children do the same
Never getting close or crossing paths
Keeping our distance
Passing with blank expressions
Sounds like there was a helicopter overhead but
I keep walking through the shallows
I feel my own presence
In the water that curls around my feet and
I dream of sinking
Into the deepest puddle
As the child gradually sinks into a bottomless puddle—leaving this world behind—their final poignant gaze becomes the voice of the powerless, silently enduring pain, unable to rise in defiance. Within the profound depth created through its simple composition yet sophisticated expression, Haze Days gives voice to the voiceless—representing one of the most accomplished works of Yoshitomo Nara’s most creatively fulfilled period.
Almost two metres in height, Haze Days (1998) is a luminous and unmistakable painting by Yoshitomo Nara. One of the artist’s iconic girls stands waist-deep in a pool, a bandage tied in a neat bow around her head. She wears a mint-green top with a single gold button. Narrowing her large, otherworldly eyes—irises black and pupils green—she meets our gaze with grumpy defiance. Foreground and background merge in a misty space of pale, pearlescent colour: subtle washes drift across the girl’s features, placing her amid the haze of the title. Impressed traces of pigment soften her eyes and mouth. The work exemplifies the unique presence of Nara’s solitary figure paintings, which radiate potent, enigmatic emotion through the most economical of means. It reveals the newly delicate palette and technique that the artist began to explore in the late 1990s, departing from the bolder, more graphic lines of his previous paintings. Nara was recently celebrated in a landmark retrospective that toured the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden and the Hayward Gallery, London from 2024 to 2025.
Haze Days dates from a watershed year for Nara. After graduating in 1993 from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—where his teachers included the artist A. R. Penck—he had moved to Cologne. He was able to work on a larger scale than ever before and painted prolifically, refining his visual language towards the standalone figures for which he is best known today. 1998 saw his first solo museum show at the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee: alongside his friend and contemporary Takashi Murakami, he was also invited by the artist Paul McCarthy to the University of California, Los Angeles as a visiting professor. That same year, 124 of Nara’s works were acquired by the preparatory committee for the Aomori Museum of Art, which would open near his Japanese hometown in 2006. These included the important painting Mumps (1996), whose bandage motif anticipates the present work. Nara lived in Cologne until 2000, when he returned to Japan to prepare for a major exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art.
Born in 1959 in Hirosaki, a traditional castle town in Japan’s rural Aomori Prefecture, Nara was awakened to art through music. He purchased his first single when he was only eight years old, and built his own radio, which allowed him to pick up broadcasts from a nearby US Air Force base. As he grew up, these record covers and foreign sounds—Janis Joplin, The Beatles, The Ramones—allowed him to imagine another world. He was also an avid reader, fascinated by Takeshi Motai’s dreamlike illustrations for the poems and fairytales of Kenji Miyazawa. Nara enrolled at Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 1979, and a few months later embarked on a formative backpacking trip through Europe, where he experienced musical subcultures and saw masterpieces of European art first hand. After graduating from Aichi University of the Arts in 1987, he moved to Düsseldorf to further his studies. It was in Germany—informed by his outsider’s perspective on Western traditions, his training in Japanese Modernism, the Pop-adjacent work of contemporaries such as Murakami and the vigour of German Neo-Expressionism—that his distinctive style took shape.
‘I think I was looking for a new form of expression through my own history,’ Nara reflected recently: ‘one that couldn’t be categorised as Japanese, Asian, or Western. When a painting emerged that became a symbol of Nara, I was very excited: This is an original!’ (Y. Nara quoted in D. Kothenschulte, ‘Die Wütenden Mädchen’, Monopol, November 2024, p. 45). Nara’s 1993 graduation show in Düsseldorf included the seminal painting The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991, San Francisco Museum of Art), which set out the emotive immediacy and playful menace that would come to characterise his famous ‘big-headed girls.’ These figures developed significantly during the Cologne years that followed. As he shed the narrative complication and heavy lines of his earlier work, Nara’s protagonists approached the distilled, enigmatic clarity of the girl in Haze Days, inhabiting spaces whose pastel tones conjured the early Renaissance frescoes he had admired in Italy.
Nara sees these characters as a form of self-portraiture, representing aspects of his mood, memories and experience. They emerge to the beat of a constant studio soundtrack that helps to stir his emotions. ‘When I paint, I always think that the canvas is like a mirror, and that I am reflected in it’, he explains. ‘By tracing myself, I create a picture. It just happens to take the form of a girl, or a dog, or an animal, and almost ninety percent of the time I think I’m drawing a self-portrait, and I’m interacting with it’ (Y. Nara quoted in M. Mishikawa, ‘The 5th TAKIFUJI Art Award Winner: Nara Yoshitomo’, Japan Traffic Culture Association, September 2017). The bandage seen in the present work recurs frequently in Nara’s paintings and drawings of this period, and refers to the compress worn by children with mumps—a common illness during the artist’s childhood. The girl’s frown implies she is in no need of our sympathy.
The figure in a puddle in is another leitmotif, appearing in key works such as In the Deepest Puddle II (1995, Takahashi Collection, Tokyo). ‘It’s a state of thinking’, Nara says of this position. ‘Not frozen in thought, but rather thinking about the next action … maybe’ (Y. Nara in conversation with Y. Ma, in Yoshitomo Nara, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 2025, p. 74). Unusually, he has identified a direct inspiration for the image in the cover for John Hiatt’s 1975 album Overcoats, which shows the musician partly submerged in a body of water. This record was included in a wall of vinyl LPs from Nara’s vast personal collection that was shown in his recent retrospective. In Haze Days, the pool heightens the painting’s liminal quality: the girl stands poised between one realm and another. She becomes an apt avatar for Nara’s practice as a whole, which merges outlooks drawn from different traditions, and whose forms—irresistibly relatable, and with a universal visual appeal—are ultimately born from a private and complex inner world.
Haze Days (1998)
Shigemi Takahashi, Chief Curator, Aomori Museum of Art
Out of a milky haze emerges the upper body of a child with a large head. Having waded through the shallows until the water reached their waist, the child suddenly pauses, turning to look back at the world behind. The child’s gaze is sharp, as though piercing every veil, and their small mouth is slightly open, as if about to speak.
Painted in 1998, Haze Days is a work by the internationally celebrated Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Born in 1959 in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, Nara moved to Germany in 1988 to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he was influenced by artists such as Michael Buthe and A. R. Penck, leading figures in the post-war German art scene. His paintings—characterised by familiar motifs rendered in stylised forms and bold outlines—succeed in conveying raw emotions such as anger and sorrow, resonating with viewers beyond the conventional boundaries of the art world.
In recent years, Nara’s international recognition has continued to grow. Over the past year, a retrospective exhibition showcasing a comprehensive selection of his early to more contemporary works travelled to The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, and The Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London. This past spring, he was also selected for TIME100: The Most Influential People of 2025, a prestigious recognition that drew widespread attention to the artist.
Nara’s distinct artistic language is perhaps best represented in works such as The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991) and Mumps (1996), depicting children with unusually large heads and sharp gazes, standing alone in vast, desolate spaces. He established this recognisable style during the early 1990s while studying in Germany, away from his homeland.
In the early period of his time in Germany, unable to speak the language and knowing very few locals, Nara spent much of his time alone in the attic of his Düsseldorf apartment. He later described these solitary days as a period of intense self-confrontation, recalling his childhood spent alone at home while his parents were at work. His days in Germany, so reminiscent of his youth, became an opportunity to reawaken the childlike sensibility dormant within him. This experience of solitude played a major role in deepening his oeuvre.
Nara’s visual language resonates with the art movements of the 1980s and 1990s that transcended the boundaries between fine art and popular culture, while also actively incorporating elements of mass media. Simultaneously, his work also represents a deeply personal form of expression—one that he arrived at through a deep exploration of his own inner world while living in a foreign and solitary milieu.
Haze Days is an exceptionally accomplished work, rendered with refined brushwork and colour. Painted during his years in Germany, the piece exemplifies Nara’s exploration of the solitary child with an oversized head and piercing eyes, standing alone in a vast, misty space. The light, softly diffused through the haze, delicately envelops the fragile child’s body, accentuating their presence and evoking the work’s title. First seen in Mumps (1996), the motif of bandages reappears in this work. The bandages wrapping the cheeks of the child allude symbolically both to the hazy, fever-induced state of consciousness as well as the pain lurking within.
Meant to symbolise the ‘boundary’ connecting different worlds, the puddle around the child’s waist is a recurring motif in Nara’s work, exemplified in early paintings such as Pandora’s Box (1990) and In the Deepest Puddle II (1995). Standing between this world and the next, the child casts a sharp gaze back at the world left behind—a gaze of anger and protest directed at those indifferent to their pain or profound loneliness.
In 1998, in the same year this work was conceived, Nara wrote a poem titled ‘A Deep, Deep Puddle’.
A Deep, Deep Puddle
I don’t know where I am
How did I get to this place
Shallow waters as far as the eye can see
The sunlight shimmers on the surface
I walk slowly wading through the water
A few scattered children do the same
Never getting close or crossing paths
Keeping our distance
Passing with blank expressions
Sounds like there was a helicopter overhead but
I keep walking through the shallows
I feel my own presence
In the water that curls around my feet and
I dream of sinking
Into the deepest puddle
As the child gradually sinks into a bottomless puddle—leaving this world behind—their final poignant gaze becomes the voice of the powerless, silently enduring pain, unable to rise in defiance. Within the profound depth created through its simple composition yet sophisticated expression, Haze Days gives voice to the voiceless—representing one of the most accomplished works of Yoshitomo Nara’s most creatively fulfilled period.