“The figures in Nara’s paintings are the result of the artist facing the deepest part of his soul; with color and composition based in painting theory, repeatedly layering and erasing color from the canvas, so that what remains in the end is only the most earnest part that could not be pared away.”
V ivid and charming, with a rebellious air, Ships in Girl is the epitome of the stylistic motifs and emotional resonance that have positioned Yoshitomo Nara as one of the most internationally acclaimed living artists of our time. Painted in 1992, Ships in GIrl emerges from the artist’s time at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie in Germany, a seminal period during which Nara developed his most iconic visual and conceptual motifs. Demonstrating the classic vernacular of the so called “Nara Girl”, the lone, childlike figure whose demure exterior often gives way to intense emotion, Ships in Girl encapsulates the principal investigations of Yoshitmo Nara’s oeuvre– childhood, innocence, loneliness, rebellion, and the complexity of memory and emotion– all delivered with a graphic punch. Testament to the importance of the works from the early 1990s, paintings from this period reside in esteemed institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, while the sister work to this piece currently resides in the collection of the artist.
In Ships in Girl, a large, geometric head floats in a flat blue expanse. Her features are simplified and charming, outlined in dark black strokes. With the large exaggerated eyes and graphic outline, the present work bears clear stylistic affinities to both Pop Art and Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts, illustrating the seamless unification of Eastern and Western themes and motifs that characterizes Nara’s revolutionary oeuvre. In lieu of a direct portrait, Nara uses Ships in Girl as a sort of character study, reflecting the viewer’s own perceptions back upon themselves. A masterful fusion of incorruptible youth and punk attitude, the present work combines mischief and innocence to convey a beguiling charm that gives way to a darker angst. At first glance, her expression seems slightly awed or surprised, but upon further inspection her gaze is concentrated and direct, her curved, open mouth almost pouty and the eyes set in a determined glare. Rather than outwardly violent or destructive, the set of the eyes and the burning flame feel almost critical, a rebellious defiance of the surrounding world.
In the early 1990s, Nara’s compositions became more stark and forthright in their graphic sensibility, which allowed that artist to expand the cultural and psychological subtext in his work. From 1988 to 1994, Nara studied at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie in Germany. Far from his native Japan, Nara reacted to the isolation and vulnerability imposed by the language barrier by way of the childlike characters that would become part of his signature artistic vocabulary .In the present work, the youthful figure is detached from any discernible setting. Adorning her hair are miniature ships on the verge of sailing off into the sprawling ocean of blue, relating to Nara’s own isolation and distance from his home. ”When I went to the school in Germany, I found myself again feeling alone, facing my canvas. Again, the inadequacy of the outer world enriched my inner world,” (Yoshitomo Nara in conversation with Aimee Lin, “How Yoshitomo Nara’s Manga-Inspired Paintings Tap Into Universal Feelings of Anxiety”, Art Review, 2015) Stripped of superfluous detail, Ships in Girl elucidates the emotive potential of the lone figure
“The time when I was depicting children in a lot of my works was probably a period when I was trying to regain something childlike.” explains Nara, “... I still do depict children, but the images that people generally associate with me are from that time when I was trying to take back my childhood” (Yoshitomo Narat quoted in: Melissa Chiu, “A Conversation with the Artist”, Exh. Cat., Asia Society Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, 2010). In Ships in Girl, Nara toys with innocence and rebellion as childlike expressions simultaneously resonate with adult emotions. Nara’s solitary children are often lauded as “symbolic representation of the dominant feelings of Japanese youth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, characterised by a sense of uncertainty about the future, vulnerability, and a yearning for the innocence preserved in the inner child” (Matsui Midori. “Art for Myself and Others: Yoshitomo Nara's Popular Imagination”, in Exh, Cat., Asia Society Museum, Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, 2010, p. 13).
Ships in Girl evinces Nara’s revolutionary painterly practice, creating a fusion of “high, low and kitsch; East and West; grown-up, adolescent and infantile; and so seamless as to render such distinctions almost moot” (Barbara Smith, “Cuddling With Little Girls, Dogs and Music”, The New York Times, 2010) “There is solitude and sadness, and sometimes a bit of rage” describes critic Marco Meneguzzo, “a small iniquity expressed perhaps to demonstrate one’s existence (Marco Meneguzzo, “Yoshitomo Nara”, Artforum (online)). Tapping directly into the emotional center of not only disaffection and anxiety but also the spiritual core at the foundation of hope and renewal, Ships in Girl is a powerful stand-in for a generation of young people at the dawn of the twenty-first century and beyond.
