In 2009, after finishing the install for a New York gallery show, Yoshitomo Nara – then 49 – headed to Niagara, a punk bar he frequented in the East Village. After a few drinks, he grabbed a marker and sketched a small cluster of his trademark doe-eyed girls on the wall, then signed and dated them before heading home.
But the night didn’t quite end there. On the way back, caught up in the moment, Nara drew a smiley face on a subway-station wall and ended up spending the night in a New York precinct. While the subway drawing was promptly erased, the staff at Niagara – not yet grasping how prominent Nara would become – chose to protect what he had left on their walls.
Now, one piece of that bar-room art is heading to Phillips: a doodled restroom door, removed and preserved in 2024, estimated at HK$800,000 (US$103,000). Offered during Art Week Hong Kong, it marks the first time the bar has sent one of Nara’s drawings to auction.
Alongside the door, Phillips is presenting a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Net painting, a post-illness work by Tracey Emin, and Liu Dan's Dictionary, among other modern and contemporary highlights. Together with the auction preview, the house is also staging a selling exhibition of works by Zao Wou-ki, running through 29 March.
Phillips’ selling exhibition, Zao Wou-Ki: Infinite Dialogues, is on view until 29 March
Auction preview at Phillips' Asia headquarters in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District
Lot 183 | Yoshitomo Nara | Informal autograph, acrylic on door, hardware
Executed in 2009, in the USA
197.8 x 64.1 cm
Provenance:
- Executed by the artist directly on the interior wall of Niagara Bar, East Village, New York, 2009
- Removed and preserved in 2024
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Art
Estimate: HK$800,000 - 1,200,000 (US$103,000 - 154,000)
Since emerging in the 1990s, Nara has become one of Japan's most celebrated contemporary artists – in 2019, his Knife Behind Back (2000) sold for HK$195 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong, earning him the title "The Most Expensive Japanese Artist." Yet despite that market status, Nara still prefers to think of himself, first and foremost, as a rock-music aficionado.
Growing up in rural Aomori, he found his artistic education in album covers. His gateway to the wider world came through a crystal radio he built at age eight. Tuning into the music station of a nearby U.S. Air Force base in Misawa, he became an unlikely witness to the evolution of Western pop – from the flower‑child optimism of the mid‑1960s to the rebellious energy of 1970s punk.
As a teenager, he found solace in rock cafés and even played in a band. That influence runs through his work: punk lyrics, band slogans, and girls holding guitars recur across his paintings and drawings, giving his wide‑eyed figures a distinctly anti‑establishment edge.
The young Yoshitomo Nara performing at Nagoya Central Park
The drawings at Niagara bar
The night at Niagara was typical Nara: spontaneous, rebellious, and fuelled by music. He had just finished installing his fourth solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, and headed to celebrate at one of his favourite punk bars.
Over the course of an exuberant evening, he covered a stretch of wall with his signature figures – a punk girl drumming and shouting Joey Ramone's iconic "Hey ho, let's go!", a bass player with a "staying cool" hat, and kids directing traffic to the restrooms.
After a boozy night out, at around 3:30 a.m., Nara was waiting with an assistant for an L‑train to Brooklyn at the First Avenue stop when officers caught him using a marker on the station wall. He spent the night in a New York holding cell before being released in time for his opening.
His longtime dealer Tim Blum, who has represented Nara since the 1990s and was in town for the show, recalls being roped in, though he no longer remembers whether he posted bail or simply handed over cash to someone. Nara would later describe the arrest as "a nice experience in my life" that was "like in the movies" – one that brought him into contact with people he might never otherwise have met.
Close-up of the present lot
Lot 9 | Yayoi Kusama | Sunset Afterglow inside My Heart, acrylic on canvas
Painted in 2020, in Japan
100 x 100 cm
Provenance:
- Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Estimate: HK$5,000,000 - 7,000,000 (US$641,000 - 897,000)
A leading highlight of the Evening Sale is Yayoi Kusama’s Sunset Afterglow Inside My Heart, a fresh‑to‑market work estimated at HK$5 million (US$641,000). Distinguished by its evocative, poetic title – a marked departure from the cool alphanumeric codes that usually accompany her Infinity Nets – the painting occupies a singular place in Kusama’s oeuvre.
When the world ground to a halt in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kusama issued a rare public statement in April, declaring that "the entire world is fighting." Created in that specific window of global anxiety, Sunset Afterglow Inside My Heart was given a romantically charged, melancholic title more commonly associated with her figurative My Eternal Soul series, begun in 2009.
On the verso, a label bears the artist’s own short poem:
Summoning you
To show me my message for God
As always, sunset afterglow
Inside my heart
Residing there
Forever
For the sake of living
LOVE
For everything that is Yayoi, and for all-encompassing Death.
Yayoi Kusama at her New York studio in 1961
Yayoi Kusama’s No. 2. J.B., an early white Infinity Net painting created in 1960 | | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Visually, the work employs Kusama’s most iconic colour combination: red and white. If her initial breakthrough in the 1960s was defined by the hush of white nets on white grounds – her so‑called “negative space” paintings – the later introduction of high‑contrast red marked a turn towards vitality. In Kusama’s lexicon, red is the colour of the sun, of blood, and of biological obsession.
Painted in 2020, when Kusama was 91, the work stands as a quintessential example of her late style. For Kusama, repeating the nets has long been an apotropaic ritual, a way of imposing order upon chaos. Where her early Infinity Nets can feel tense and anxious, here the paint is applied with a fluid ease. The circles are no longer a confining cage but rather an undulating wave, creating a visual field that feels less like imprisonment and more like meditation.
By giving this pandemic-era work a poetic title, she focuses on the light that persists after the day's end – a message of hope and endurance from an artist who has spent her life seeking survival through art.
Close-up of the present lot
Lot 6 | Tracey Emin | I See the Mirror, acrylic on canvas
Painted in 2022, in the UK
152.1 x 182 cm
Provenance:
- Galleria Lorcan O'Neill, Rome
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Estimate: HK$3,500,000 - 4,500,000 (US$449,000 - 577,000)
One of the most influential figures in contemporary British art, Tracey Emin is currently under the art world's spotlight with her monumental retrospective A Second Life running at Tate Modern through September – the largest exhibition of her work to date. Coinciding with the show, Phillips is offering I See the Mirror, estimated at HK$3.5 million (US$449,000).
A leading light of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Emin has spent three decades shattering taboos through radically vulnerable, autobiographical work. Across painting, sculpture, neon, and installation, she delves into the unsettling corners of the human condition: desire, trauma, grief, and survival.
Rejecting the cool detachment of much conceptual art, she has instead embraced an almost confessional intimacy, loudly insisting that the personal is political. Her seminal work My Bed (1998) – which scandalised audiences and earned her a Turner Prize nomination – cemented her art-historical status.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin | My Bed (1998) | Currently on view at Tate Modern, London
Painted in 2022, I See the Mirror emerges from what is widely regarded as her most critically acclaimed period – a profound creative rebirth following her battle with aggressive cancer in 2020. The major surgery that saved her life also irrevocably altered her body, leaving her, in her own words, with “severe disabilities.”
Born from a period of intense physical recovery and psychological reinvention, the large-scale canvas draws the viewer into the bedroom – that private sanctuary which has anchored Emin's practice since My Bed.
Much of the composition is given over to the raw, flesh-toned linen, with only swift, economical lines suggesting the forms of a bedside table and lamp. At its centre lies a prone, naked female figure – the artist herself – collapsed upon the bed. Emin renders the body with a frantic, intensely expressive line, capturing a state of profound exhaustion, vulnerability, and surrender.
Never before seen at auction, the work was included in You Should Have Saved Me, Emin’s introspective solo exhibition at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome in 2023.
The present lot exhibited at Galleria Lorcan O'Neill in Rome, You Should Have Saved Me, 2023
Close-up of the present lot
Lot 11 | Liu Dan | Dictionary, ink and colour on paper
Executed in 2011, in China
200 x 260 cm
Provenance:
- Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Estimate: HK$3,500,000 - 4,500,000 (US$449,000 - 577,000)
Another highlight is Liu Dan’s Dictionary, a monumental ink painting once exhibited at the Musée Guimet in Paris. Liu is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese ink painting, combining scholarly depth with a singular artistic vision that has redefined ink art’s possibilities on the global stage.
In this work, he masterfully employs traditional Chinese ink techniques to subvert the conventional perceptions of reality. The subject is striking in its grand scale: a common pocket dictionary for elementary school students is dramatically enlarged, upending scale and perspective and transforming a familiar object into a majestic, immersive visual presence.
When asked about this massive dictionary painting, Liu Dan posed a question regarding contemporary art: "I often think that when a person is reading a painting, they should also try to ask themselves – is this painting also reading you at the same time?"
Yet the true brilliance of the piece lies in its synthesis of opposing forces. Liu renders his subject with a precision that approaches photorealism, while every brushstroke remains deeply rooted in the lyrical subtlety and refined spirit of classical Chinese tradition.
Liu Dan in his studio
Close-up of the present lot
Close-up of the present lot
Other Highlight Lots from Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale:
Lot 12 | Zhang Xiaogang | Bloodline Series - Father and Daughter, oil on canvas
Painted in 2005, in China
200 x 260 cm
Provenance:
- The Farber Collection (acquired directly from the artist)
- Phillips, London, 13 October 2007, lot 507
- Private Collection
- Phillips, Hong Kong, 6 October 2023, lot 9
- Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: HK$3,500,000 - 5,500,000
Lot 13 | Nicolas Party | Two Portraits, pastel on linen
Executed in 2016, in Belgium
140 x 140.3 cm
Provenance:
- Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
- Private Collection, Hong Kong
- Private Collection (acquired from the above)
- Phillips, Hong Kong, 22 June 2022, lot 16
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: HK$2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Lot 14 | Takashi Murakami | Untitled, acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel
Executed in 2019, in Japan
150 x 140 cm
Provenance:
- Perrotin Gallery, Hong Kong
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$2,200,000 - 3,500,000
Lot 10 | Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Paysage aux oliviers, oil on canvas
Painted in circa 1901, in France
36.8 x 49.4 cm
Provenance:
- (possibly) Ambroise Vollard, Paris
- Private Collection
- Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., London (acquired from the above in 1953)
- Harry Oppenheimer Collection, Johannesburg (acquired from the above in 1953)
- Private Collection, South Africa (acquired through Wildenstein & Co. Inc. in 1974)
- Private Collection, France
- Versailles Enchères, Versailles, 19 December 2010, lot 33
- Private Collection, USA
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Lot 7 | Adam Pendleton | Untitled (Days), silkscreen ink on canvas
Executed in 2023, in the USA
127 x 152.4 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
- Private Collection, New York
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$1,500,000 - 2,400,000
Lot 15 | Huang Yuxing | Full Moon, acrylic on canvas
Painted in 2017-2018, in China
90 x 120.5 cm
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Asia (acquired directly from the artist)
- Private Collection (acquired from the above)
- Christie's, Hong Kong, 29 May 2024, lot 309
- Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: HK$900,000 - 1,500,000
Lot 2 | Mehdi Ghadyanloo | The Unreachable Beauties, acrylic on canvas
Painted in 2022, in Germany
180 x 250 cm
Provenance:
- Gagosian, New York
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$800,000 - 1,500,000
Auction Details:
Auction House: Phillips Hong Kong
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Number of Lots: 16
Date and Time: 29 March | 4 pm (Hong Kong local time)
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Art Sale
Number of Lots: 113
Date and Time: 29 March | 5 pm (Hong Kong local time)
Auction Preview and Selling Exhibition: Now until 29 March | 11 am - 7 pm
Location: Phillips Asia Headquarters, GF, WKCDA Tower, West Kowloon Cultural District, No. 8 Austin Road West, Kowloon, Hong Kong