A master's works give art emotional depth
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E-mail China Daily, July 10, 2022
"We want to extend the exhibition for as long as possible to ensure people can view it," says Sun Yuanchen, the museum's director of marketing and business development.
About 30,000 early bird tickets were sold before the show was forced to close on March 9, Sun says.
"We offered a refund, but most buyers decided to hold on to their tickets and wait until the epidemic was over."
The museum also adjusted its closing time to 9 pm so as to receive more visitors.
During the hiatus when Yuz was closed like all other cultural facilities in Shanghai, the museum opened an online shop selling merchandise linked to the Nara exhibition.
"We wanted to reach as many people as possible, so we set a limit for each person to buy no more than two items," Sun says. "Even though no merchandise could be shipped during the lockdown in April and May, the sales were beyond our expectations. The buyers are from all over the country."
The curator of the exhibition, Mika Yoshitake, who did not attend the opening in Shanghai because of the pandemic, says Nara's works reflect his raw encounters with his inner self, taking inspiration from a wide range of resources-memories of his childhood, music, literature, studying and living in Germany from 1988 to 2000, exploring his roots in Asia and the Russian island of Sakhalin, and modern art from Europe and Japan.
From a wall of album covers Nara began collecting as a teenager, to paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramic and installations, the exhibition reflects his career spanning more than 30 years, from 1987 to 2021, shining a light on his creative process and evolution of style and ideas.
One of the paintings, Emergency, created in 2013, depicts a girl taken away on a wheeled stretcher amid the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011 and the tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster that ensued.
"Nara lived only 70 kilometers from the epicenter and drove to the area near the disaster zone with his mother to deliver food and help those in need," Yoshitake wrote of the painting, which is "perhaps one of the artist's most personal images".
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