Who is Nara?...
Pop Art was emerged in the United States, mid 1950s in Britain and in the 1960s. Pop Art is a visual art movement and one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Pop art is characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books which aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art nowadays.Such pop art's artist is Andy Warhol that also known as Prince of Pop Art.
Thus,Pop art has influenced many artists throughout the world and some of them are Japanese Pop artist, Yoshitomo Nara is one of the rise artists of the New Millennium and used children as a subject in almost all of his art, creates scenes of anger or rebellion through children. Nara’s work actually based by his recollection of chillhood happiness and traumatic, strong influenced of rock and punk music, Japanese Manga comics and the well-ordered structure of Japanese society.
Thus,Pop art has influenced many artists throughout the world and some of them are Japanese Pop artist, Yoshitomo Nara is one of the rise artists of the New Millennium and used children as a subject in almost all of his art, creates scenes of anger or rebellion through children. Nara’s work actually based by his recollection of chillhood happiness and traumatic, strong influenced of rock and punk music, Japanese Manga comics and the well-ordered structure of Japanese society.
Yoshitomo Nara was born 1959 in Hirosaki, Japan and currently lives and works in Tokyo. Nara received his B.F.A. (1985) and an M.F.A. (1987) from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music. Between 1988 and 1993, Nara studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in Germany. Nara has had nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984. Nara is well known for exploring the tensions of a hyper consumer culture by using deceptively simple drawing, paintings and sculptures of cute and knowing children inspired by American cartoons, manga, rock 'n' roll and punk culture, which surrounded Nara while growing up in Japan.
According to Takashi Murakami, in his writing; Japanese Pop Art is unique and identifiable as Japanese because of the regular subjects and styles. The movement has been strongly influenced by postwar American pop art and by Western music and film. Like American Pop Art, Japanese Pop Art borrows from popular culture, consumer products and comic books, but also is heavily indebted to traditional Japanese art and animation. Some Pop artists from Japan have found fame in the United States, while many art experts recognize Japanese Pop Art as the most influential Pop Art movement in the world today.
Many Japanese pop artists take inspiration largely from anime, and sometimes ukiyo-e and traditional Japanese art. One of the best-known pop artists currently in Japan is Yoshitomo Nara famous for their graffiti-inspired art, and some, such as Takashi Murakami, are famous for mass-produced plastic or polymer figurines. Many pop artists in Japan use surreal or obscene, shocking images in their art, taken from Japanese hentai. This element of the art catches the eye of viewers young and old, and is extremely thought-provoking, but is not taken as offensive in Japan. A common metaphor used in Japanese pop art is the innocence and vulnerability of children and youth.
Nara is part of a generation of Japanese Pop artists who first rose to prominence in the mid-'90s. An attempt to define a modern, uniquely Japanese aesthetic, Japanese pop art is characterized by flat colors, crisp lines and irreverent subject matter. The movement employs the style and vocabulary of contemporary pop culture in order to both critique and celebrate it. Such prominent Japanese Pop artist, Takashi Murakami has dubbed this aesthetic "Superflat," referring not only to the traditional flatness of Japanese drawings and animation, but to the collapsing of hierarchies between fine art and commerce.
According by book, ART NOW (2002), Yoshitomo Nara is one of the rises artists in the millennium and most influential artists to emerge from Japan during the Pop art movement of the nineties. Nara's work mines the pop culture of his childhood. Growing up in Aomori Prefecture, he was a latchkey kid whose childhood companions were most often pets and the television. It's no wonder then that Nara's figures are usually alone, and that their bodies resemble the simple, rounded forms of early, animated classics like Astro Boy and Speed Racer more than the sleek, angular look of contemporary anime.
Nara’s employing a format that resembles the kitschiest of all consumer goods such as the commemorative plate. Nara suggests that fine art is just a larger, more expensive version of commercial products. And Nara's characters are just as likely to appear on a key chain or an ashtray as in a gallery or museum. This foray into consumer culture has helped him win an enthusiastic cult following, not only in Japan, but also in the United States and Europe. T-shirts emblazoned with his images are also even appeared on the TV shows Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Many Japanese pop artists take inspiration largely from anime, and sometimes ukiyo-e and traditional Japanese art. One of the best-known pop artists currently in Japan is Yoshitomo Nara famous for their graffiti-inspired art, and some, such as Takashi Murakami, are famous for mass-produced plastic or polymer figurines. Many pop artists in Japan use surreal or obscene, shocking images in their art, taken from Japanese hentai. This element of the art catches the eye of viewers young and old, and is extremely thought-provoking, but is not taken as offensive in Japan. A common metaphor used in Japanese pop art is the innocence and vulnerability of children and youth.
Nara is part of a generation of Japanese Pop artists who first rose to prominence in the mid-'90s. An attempt to define a modern, uniquely Japanese aesthetic, Japanese pop art is characterized by flat colors, crisp lines and irreverent subject matter. The movement employs the style and vocabulary of contemporary pop culture in order to both critique and celebrate it. Such prominent Japanese Pop artist, Takashi Murakami has dubbed this aesthetic "Superflat," referring not only to the traditional flatness of Japanese drawings and animation, but to the collapsing of hierarchies between fine art and commerce.
According by book, ART NOW (2002), Yoshitomo Nara is one of the rises artists in the millennium and most influential artists to emerge from Japan during the Pop art movement of the nineties. Nara's work mines the pop culture of his childhood. Growing up in Aomori Prefecture, he was a latchkey kid whose childhood companions were most often pets and the television. It's no wonder then that Nara's figures are usually alone, and that their bodies resemble the simple, rounded forms of early, animated classics like Astro Boy and Speed Racer more than the sleek, angular look of contemporary anime.
Nara’s employing a format that resembles the kitschiest of all consumer goods such as the commemorative plate. Nara suggests that fine art is just a larger, more expensive version of commercial products. And Nara's characters are just as likely to appear on a key chain or an ashtray as in a gallery or museum. This foray into consumer culture has helped him win an enthusiastic cult following, not only in Japan, but also in the United States and Europe. T-shirts emblazoned with his images are also even appeared on the TV shows Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
As well as being an artist, Nara is also a pop musician and a designer of T-shirts, CD covers, fanzines, buttons, dolls and other lifestyle products. In his work, he draws on a medley of sources, including pop culture, comic strips, manga Japanese and Western artistic traditions. Adored by everyone from art critics to punk kids, Nara's figures haunt galleries and museums and adorn T-shirts, CD cases, ashtrays and clocks. They are peppered now into the fabric of American pop culture. At the San Jose Museum of Art exhibiton entitle "Nothing Ever Happens, 2004" Nara's traveling solo exhibition, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art.
Yoshitomo Nara is not only famous in Japan and Europe, where he's exhibited in galleries and museums since the mid-'80s, but also in the United States. Nara has a rock-star-like appeal, and his career momentum is still on the upswing. At a Sotheby's auction this May, a 1999 Nara painting sold for $198,400, more than twice the pre-event estimate, firmly establishing Nara as a key figure in what some art professionals call the Japanese New Pop movement, a proliferating style and approach that incorporates and comments on iterations of kawaii, or cute.
Over the last few years, Nara has frequently collaborated on exhibitions with Japanese design collective Graf. Yoshitomo Nara and graf building the installation and they continue to explore an ongoing theme of the relationship between the individual and the space they inhabit, a work and it's environment, as well as art and life. In doing this, the artists hope to revive the idea of a narrative. The artists realise their goal by the completion of the 26th house, with a street name representative of the 26th letter of the alphabet, A-Z.
writer by Razlan Adnan(my final year thesis on UiTM)
writer by Razlan Adnan(my final year thesis on UiTM)
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