Over the past three decades, the “Nara girl” – solitary, doe-eyed, and big-headed – has become one of the most instantly recognisable figures in contemporary art, resonating with audiences across continents.
But who exactly is she? The artist Yoshitomo Nara has offered many answers over the years: a self-portrait in disguise, a vessel for childhood memory, a tribute to his unborn sister – and yet, not based on any one person. Perhaps, then, the more revealing question isn’t who she is, but what she asks of us. That answer, in many ways, lies in the subtleties of her shifting expressions – and in the emotional terrain of the artist behind them.
This month, fresh off his largest European retrospective – this summer's acclaimed exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery – two pivotal paintings head to auction in Hong Kong, offering collectors a rare glimpse into Nara’s practice at two defining moments in his career.
On 27 September, Phillips presents Pinky (2000), estimated at HK$60 million (US$7.7 million) – a work that captures Nara at a crucial turning point. Fresh to the market, it marks his breakthrough moment upon returning to Japan after twelve transformative years in Germany.
The following evening at Sotheby’s, Can’t Wait ’til the Night Comes (2012) tells a very different story. Estimated at HK$65 million (US$8.4 million), this haunting, vampire-like portrait took nearly a year to complete and conceals an earlier composition beneath its surface – a testament to how Nara’s practice had deepened into something far more psychologically complex.
Yoshitomo Nara
Lot 11 | Yoshitomo Nara | Pinky, acrylic on canvas
Painted in 2000, in Germany
160 x 145 cm
Estimate: HK$60,000,000-80,000,000 (US$7.69 - 10.26 million)
Auction House: Phillips Hong Kong
Sale: Modern &Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Date and Time: 27 September 2025 | 7 pm (Hong Kong local time)
Yoshitomo Nara was born in 1959 in postwar Hirosaki, a rural city in the Aomori Prefecture of northern Japan. With both parents working, Nara was a so-called “latchkey kid,” spending long hours alone after coming home from preschool.
Most afternoons, the only company waiting for him was the stray cat his family had taken in – one of many animals in his hometown he considered close friends. Compared to the fast-developing cities further south, life in Hirosaki felt suspended in time.
To entertain himself, he turned to visual media: television, Japanese and American comics, and European children’s books, among which he was especially drawn to Aesop’s Fables. At the age of eight, Nara built his own crystal radio – a treasured companion that opened his ears to the wider world.
Tuning into the music station of a nearby U.S. Air Force base in Misawa, he became an improbable witness to the evolution of Western pop – from the flower-child optimism of the mid-1960s to the rebellious energy of 1970s punk. Music would go on to leave a lasting imprint on his artistic style.
Yoshitomo Nara’s home studio
Yoshitomo Nara’s vinyl record collection, a key source of inspiration in his early art
In 1988, Nara left Japan as a young art graduate to study at the famous Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under the German painter A.R. Penck (1939–2017). What began as a six-year artistic apprenticeship turned into a much longer stay. He remained in Germany for twelve years, eventually settling in Cologne and developing his practice independently.
The solitude of these years brought with it a deeper introspection. Living abroad stirred memories of his childhood loneliness, but it also, as he later wrote, allowed him to recover a “sense of true self” – something he felt had faded in Japan, where he was constantly aware of “being watched by other people.”
Working in a converted factory space on the outskirts of Cologne, Nara threw himself into his art with unprecedented intensity. He later recalled how he “worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head.”
At times, standing before the easel, he felt as though he were on a solitary voyage through outer space, where his “spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while painting, even to the edge of the universe.”
Untitled (1992) | Sold: HK$4,318,000, Phillips Hong Kong, 2024
Lot 22 | Untitled (1990) | 180 x 110 cm | Estimate: HK$10,000,000 - 15,000,000 | To be offered at Phillips' upcoming evening sale
By the mid-1990s, Nara was exhibiting occasionally in Nagoya and Tokyo. His paintings from this period featured thick black outlines, vibrant, Neo-Expressionist colours, and a rough, childlike aesthetic. But toward the end of the decade, his style began to soften: surfaces grew more delicate, colours shifted to pale pastels, and harsh lines dissolved into something quieter and more luminous – influenced in part by artists such as Giotto.
When he created the present painting, Pinky, in Cologne in 2000 – a year widely considered the apex of his artistic production – it was likely around the time he received a three-month eviction notice for his art studio, which was “slated for destruction because it was falling apart.”
The loss of his creative sanctuary proved decisive. “Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland,” he later recalled.
Knife Behind Back (2000) | Sold: HK$195,696,000, Sotheby's Hong Kong, 2019 (Auction record for the artist)
Missing in Action (2000) | Sold: HK$123,725,000, Phillips Hong Kong, 2021 (Second most expensive painting by the artist sold at auction)
His return coincided with a surge of global interest in Japanese pop culture, which helped amplify his presence on the international art scene. Taking over a large two-story warehouse in Tokyo that served as both studio and living space, he embarked on a dramatically new body of work.
Moving to large-format canvases, he began creating portraits of little girls against luminous, pearlescent backgrounds, bathing them in subtly glowing light – a metaphor for a little self situated within a vast, indifferent world.
His figures became markedly more humanized: heads smaller, expressions gentler, their body proportions approaching those of real children rather than the exaggerated forms of his earlier work. Gone were the prominent weapons of his 1990s paintings (now reserved for his works on paper), replaced by a newfound serenity – one that paradoxically heightened the emotional intensity of his solitary children.
Close up of the present lot, Pinky (2020)
Close up of the present lot, Pinky (2020)
Of the 33 paintings he created that year – including his top two auction records Knife Behind Back and Missing in Action – only 11 share Pinky's arresting head-and-shoulders composition.
By cropping away context, Nara forces a direct confrontation. We stand eye-to-eye with this girl in her pale blue dress. Her face emerges through multiple layers of semi-translucent acrylic that Nara applied without assistants, creating a surface texture that shifts between opacity and transparency.
The painting reflects his musical influences through its restrained, introspective tone. Where the iconic Knife Behind Back channels punk aggression, Pinky resonates with quieter sources like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. The title plays on this duality: both an innocent nickname and a nod to punk culture’s adoption of pink as a rebellious colour.
Lot 18 | Yoshitomo Nara | Can't Wait 'til the Night Comes, acrylic on canvas
Painted in 2012
193.6 x 183 cm
Estimate: HK$65,000,000 - 85,000,000 (US$8.4 - 11 million)
Auction House: Sotheby’s Hong Kong
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction
Date and Time: 28 September 2025 | 6 pm (Hong Kong local time)
The following decade saw Nara's international reputation soar. His first major solo exhibition in Japan, I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me (2001–2002), toured from the Yokohama Museum of Art to massive crowds, particularly among younger audiences. Major exhibitions in the United States and Europe soon followed, cementing his status as a global phenomenon.
Can’t Wait ’til the Night Comes was painted in 2012, following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011. The painting debuted as the poster image for NARA Yoshitomo: a bit like you and me... at the Yokohama Museum of Art, later travelling to Aomori and Kumamoto.
In 2012, the painting was featured in Nara's exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art
The disaster – which left more than 450,000 people homeless and claimed over 18,000 lives – marked a turning point for Nara, who has deep ties to Japan’s northeast, the region hardest hit. Initially, he lost the desire to paint. But after a period of reflection and engagement with affected communities, he returned to the studio with renewed purpose and creative energy.
The resulting works mark a shift in his visual language. The once-menacing expressions of his girls are softened; his figures appear more frequently from the bust upwards; his colour palette expands; and his surfaces take on a shimmering translucency built through slow, meditative layering. He began building up thin washes of paint over time, sometimes spending months on the monochromatic backgrounds of a single canvas.
Sleepless Night (Cat) (1999) | Sold: HK$34,925,000, Christie’s Hong Kong, 2019
Midnight Vampire (2010) | Sold: HK$17,500,000, Christie’s Hong Kong, 2017
Can't Wait 'til the Night Comes took eleven months to complete. Beneath its surface lies an entirely different painting – a child holding a two-leaf sprout, a peace symbol Nara had used for years. But after the earthquake, the image took on a new weight.
"How many children have I depicted holding a futaba sprout...?", Nara asked. "I don't think many people have noticed that the nuclear plant in Fukushima is located in a place called Futaba."
Rather than scrape away the original, Nara painted over it. The hidden sprout became a ghostly, vampire-like figure with pale skin and the faint suggestion of fangs. The transformation mirrored his own nocturnal working schedule – he typically painted from midnight until dawn, alone in his studio with punk music playing.
The making of Can't Wait Until the Night Comes
Close up of the present lot, Can't Wait Until the Night Comes (2000)
This nocturnal practice reflected a deeper evolution in how Nara approached his subjects. By 2005, he had begun treating their eyes with greater realism, using subtle plays of light and shadow to evoke more nuanced emotion.
“They say human eyes are the mirror of the soul, and I used to draw them too carelessly,” he reflected. “I drew obviously-angry eyes, projected my anger there, and somehow released my pent-up emotions. [Afterwards] I became more interested in expressing complex feelings in a more complex way.”
In Can't Wait 'til the Night Comes, those eyes – one a biscuit-fired red, the other an olive green – seem to hold everything: the hidden sprout of hope buried beneath, the weight of disaster, the artist’s own nocturnal solitude. Perhaps this is what the Nara girl has always wanted from us – not simply to be seen, but to be truly looked at.