The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

196 YNG (Yoshitomo Nara and graf) Discovering new worlds Yoshitomo Nara is that rare kind of artist whose works have deeply infiltrated people’s lives. Across all his productions and activities, there is an implicit recognition that the elements of visual culture which resonate with us most strongly tend not to be in museums, but in the private spaces we inhabit. Accordingly, while Nara has been well- known in the international art world for the past decade, he has also found a place for his creations in the broader public sphere. His books, T-shirts, toys and other products are strategically mass-marketed, counterbalancing the high demand for his paintings and drawings. As a result, Nara’s work is as likely to be found in bedrooms and living rooms as it is in museums and galleries. As with most artists, Nara’s art works are created in the private space of the studio. Here, as part of an intimate environment, they find their first home alongside myriad other elements populating the space. There is generally a great shift in ambience from the studio to the exhibition gallery, and Nara’s collaborations with the design firm graf media gm, under the acronym YNG, might be understood as proposals for negotiating this shift. In over 20 collaborative projects in Japan and internationally, YNG have created exhibition environments with distinct emotional registers, each responding to its specific locality as well as creating comfortable homes for Nara’s works. As Nara has explained: I believe an environment has an essential impact on how one creates work. Various factors such as the music playing in the room, the colour on the wall and surrounding objects all affect my painting. I want to bring those elements to the exhibition space, which then becomes a ‘hut’. 1 Prior to the establishment of the YNG collaboration, huts had often appeared as motifs in Nara’s paintings, and were portrayed in his trademark shorthand, illustrative style. While not as prevalent as children or animals, the simplified hut form can be found in works dating back to the 1980s. The subsequent YNG huts, the first of which was executed in 2003, have adapted Nara’s basic form, melding it with other improvised, DIY structures. The specific forms of YNG’s constructions are often inspired by local, and at times unregulated, innovations in the built environment. One of the earliest examples, Kabul note 2002 2004, was inspired by Nara’s 2002 trip to Afghanistan where he witnessed dwellings fabricated from discarded materials found on or close to the site, which embodied a self-reliant and ecological approach to construction. In 2004, YNG applied this principle to the museum, constructing what they described as an ‘Afghan-style shed’ entirely from discarded crates, construction materials and other elements found in the museum’s warehouse. Other YNG ‘huts’ have borrowed from mobile structures such as tents, or taken evolving, additive forms reminiscent of Brazilian favelas . Each YNG hut acts as a platform for collaboration — not only between Nara and graf, but also with the local installation teams with which they work. graf founder Hideki Toyoshima visited Brisbane with Nara in April 2009, and both were fascinated by the ubiquitous ‘Queenslander’ house, raised from the ground on stilts and often housing a car underneath. In the commission for APT6, YNG have constructed a hut from reclaimed timbers and other found materials, sitting atop a small van. The hut’s interior, filled with Nara’s drawings and objects, is held tantalisingly out of reach to Gallery visitors — viewers are compelled to peer in from the top of ladders or to look down through the hut’s open ceiling from the Pavilion Walk above on the Gallery’s third level. In a text discussing the conceptual origin of his collaborations with Nara, Toyoshima referred to vacant lots remembered from his childhood — abandoned spaces where children would congregate for unsupervised and unstructured play, adapting the space to suit their needs and creating their own rules for engagement. 2 YNG employ a similar logic in their approach to the museum. By establishing an autonomous zone within APT6, YNG have created a complete exhibition within the exhibition — it is at once a sculpture on display in the Gallery, as well as a portal transporting us back to the artist’s studio. Nicholas Chambers Endnotes 1 Yukie Kamiya, ‘Yoshitomo Nara and graf: Happy together’, Art Asia Pacific , no.52, 2007, p.83. 2 Hideki Toyoshima, ‘The A to Z of A to Z ’, Art iT , vol.4, no.3, summer–fall 2006, p.52.