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拍品專文
At first glance, Yoshitomo Nara’s Crated Room No. 4 (2006) looks like nothing more than a large wooden shipping crate. But there are peepholes punched in its sides, with light glowing from within. Peer inside, and a magical interior is revealed: four of Nara’s iconic white dog sculptures, smiling peacefully, in an illuminated all-white room. Beneath the floor is a second level, visible through peepholes lower to the ground—this time with four white dogs in a dark room. This playful, thought-provoking installation encapsulates the charm of Nara’s work, whose deceptively simple motifs are rich in complex feeling. The dog is a nostalgic avatar for Nara, evoking—like his famous big-headed children—the innocence, loneliness and dreams of childhood. Crated Room No. 4 deepens the interiority of his paintings, inviting us to contemplate the imaginative worlds inside ourselves.
Nara began creating room installations in the early 2000s, working in collaboration with the Osaka-based creative design studio graf. Shown around the globe, these works range from fairytale cabins to imagined versions of his studio, a recreation of the rock café Nara built with his friends during high school, and—for the ambitious A to Z Village (2006), installed in an old brewery near Hirosaki—a complex of 44 houses built with the help of thousands of volunteers. Nara furnished the rooms’ interiors with his paintings, sculptures and works on paper. My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included (2008) was a centrepiece in his 2025 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, its scattered drawings, ephemera and trinkets offering viewers a fictionalised glimpse into the artist’s creative process.
‘These fantastical, childlike rooms disrupted the institutional spaces of museums and galleries’, writes Yeewan Koon. ‘In the context of their installation, the rough-and-ready aesthetics and casually presented displays of these constructed studios blur the lines between the personal (Nara), the theatrical (the staged installation), and the institutional (where it is housed)’ (Y. Koon, Yoshitomo Nara, London 2020, p. 143). Some of Nara’s rooms are large enough for the viewer to enter: the interiors of others can be seen through windows. Crated Room No. 4 is visually impenetrable until seen up close. The viewer is obliged to bend down to a child’s height to look through the peepholes, creating an intimate experience. The interior conjures not a studio but a whimsical inner world, with memories or a subconscious, perhaps, lying dormant in the dark room below.
While intensely personal in origin, Nara’s work communicates to us all, collapsing boundaries through the potent simplicity of its forms. In a wistful poem titled ‘Dogs from Your Childhood’, the artist describes a dog that he sees in his mind’s eye. ‘From the expanding watchtower of my frontal lobe, / My thoughts race beyond the dream mountains to the wide-open wilderness, / Where a wafer moon gently melts. / In the midst of the milk-white fog, / A dog spins around and around. / Boarding a plane on the pier of my heart, / A transfusion line flies off, / Sightseeing its way towards that dog. / If the gathered past becomes the present, / Then perhaps the fragment of the imploding now that is the dog, is me, is you, as well’ (Y. Nara, ‘Dogs from Your Childhood’, 1997, in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, Nuremberg 2001, p. 105).
Nara began creating room installations in the early 2000s, working in collaboration with the Osaka-based creative design studio graf. Shown around the globe, these works range from fairytale cabins to imagined versions of his studio, a recreation of the rock café Nara built with his friends during high school, and—for the ambitious A to Z Village (2006), installed in an old brewery near Hirosaki—a complex of 44 houses built with the help of thousands of volunteers. Nara furnished the rooms’ interiors with his paintings, sculptures and works on paper. My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included (2008) was a centrepiece in his 2025 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, its scattered drawings, ephemera and trinkets offering viewers a fictionalised glimpse into the artist’s creative process.
‘These fantastical, childlike rooms disrupted the institutional spaces of museums and galleries’, writes Yeewan Koon. ‘In the context of their installation, the rough-and-ready aesthetics and casually presented displays of these constructed studios blur the lines between the personal (Nara), the theatrical (the staged installation), and the institutional (where it is housed)’ (Y. Koon, Yoshitomo Nara, London 2020, p. 143). Some of Nara’s rooms are large enough for the viewer to enter: the interiors of others can be seen through windows. Crated Room No. 4 is visually impenetrable until seen up close. The viewer is obliged to bend down to a child’s height to look through the peepholes, creating an intimate experience. The interior conjures not a studio but a whimsical inner world, with memories or a subconscious, perhaps, lying dormant in the dark room below.
While intensely personal in origin, Nara’s work communicates to us all, collapsing boundaries through the potent simplicity of its forms. In a wistful poem titled ‘Dogs from Your Childhood’, the artist describes a dog that he sees in his mind’s eye. ‘From the expanding watchtower of my frontal lobe, / My thoughts race beyond the dream mountains to the wide-open wilderness, / Where a wafer moon gently melts. / In the midst of the milk-white fog, / A dog spins around and around. / Boarding a plane on the pier of my heart, / A transfusion line flies off, / Sightseeing its way towards that dog. / If the gathered past becomes the present, / Then perhaps the fragment of the imploding now that is the dog, is me, is you, as well’ (Y. Nara, ‘Dogs from Your Childhood’, 1997, in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, Nuremberg 2001, p. 105).