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Published on the occasion of Yoshitomo Nara’s major solo exhibition at the Aomori Museum of Art, “The Beginning Place” guides readers through the career of this exceptional Japanese artist.

Beginning with one of Nara’s earliest oil paintings (discarded as ‘unwanted work’ and discovered by the painter Hiroshi Sugito), the book traces Nara’s development, influences and impact through hundreds of images and accompanying texts divided into five themed chapters. In addition to Nara’s most famous works, “The Beginning Place” also includes reference material, sketches, and photographs from Nara’s many travels around the world.

The appendix consists of essays by Aomori Museum of Art curator Shigemi Takahashi, philosophy scholar Masato Goda, and music critic Josh Kun, as well as a detailed chronology and list of works (all text in Japanese & English).

“There is little doubt that artist Yoshitomo Nara is at his best in the works he created during the 1990s in which he depicted glaring children standing in a vast space […] These works were germinated in a creative universe constructed by Nara during his lonely days in a foreign land, Germany, and as described above, are the result of his separation from his home and his subsequent wanderings with a continual sense of instability.”
― from Shigemi Takahashi’s essay