A recent creation on exhibition is Light Haze Days/Study, 2020, painted in June during the pandemic. Still depicting the recurrent subject of a little girl, he tried to search for a new stylistic direction. According to the curator, the expression on this painting "exudes a pensive warmth that differs from the distant introspective gaze of his previous portraits, signaling an emotional shift that is affected by the pandemic".

While Nara enjoys great popularity in the art market, as well as contemporary pop culture, he "is not a trendy artist, and the exhibition is more than just social media sensation", says Le Mengrong, a Shanghai art critic. Nara was a role model for many emerging Chinese artists, he says. The root of his success was "a kid who loves to paint, whose style happened to be popular with the audience", to "finding his inner voice, and capturing intricate colors of his mood".

Le is especially touched by the many works on paper.

"They are often small in scale, and created on random materials, such as the back of a used envelope, a torn-up cardboard box and a page on the notepad."

Standing in front of these paintings, one cannot help but feel the artist's passion for creativity and telling his true feelings with his painting brush.

"You see in these paintings the softest corners in his heart, his solitude, weakness, and scorn,"Le says. "The more intricate and trivial these emotions are, the bigger resonance they evoke in the viewer."

The publisher of the first biography of Yoshitomo Nara in Chinese, Chen Ken, founding director of the Shanghai publisher Insight Books, also talked of the strong emotional impact Nara's art had on him.

"I was struck by the powerful emotions in his paintings of a tearful doggy and grumpy girl, about 20 years ago. Nara has the intuition and bluntness of a child, incomparable to any other artist of our time."

About three years ago, Chen said,"I believed it was the time to make a summing-up for Nara and his art, and approached him about a biography.

"We set up the interviews with him and arranged his writings, recollections and narration to put together this book, so it came out simultaneously in Chinese and Japanese recently, just in time for the exhibition in Shanghai.

Insight Books has established a system working with international artists and architects.

"We interviewed Vietnam's top architect, Vo Trong Nghia, and had his biography published, and we were the first in the world to publish the work of the Russian comic artist Anton Gudim," Chen says.

If you go

Yoshitomo Nara

Open 1 pm-9 pm, Tue-Thur; 10 am-9 pm, Fri-Sun, closed on Monday, last entry no later than 8 pm. Yuz Museum, 35 Fenggu Road, Xuhui district, Shanghai; 021-6426-1901

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