A $10 Goodwill Ashtray, a $25 Million Canvas: The Two Markets of Yoshitomo Nara

Terrell Brown paid $10 for an oversized ashtray at a Goodwill in Wheaton, Illinois, and resold it on eBay for $2,860. The ashtray carried the slogan "Too Young to Die" and a fierce, round-headed girl with enormous eyes — the signature imagery of Yoshitomo Nara, one of the most expensive living artists at auction and, according to his youngest fans, frequently an artist whose name they do not know.

Brown, now a vintage reseller with almost 360,000 TikTok followers, learned the artist's identity from a Reddit commenter: "Yoshitomo Nara is a really cool and famous artist, this is an amazing find!"

What does this week change for Nara?

Powerhouse dealer David Zwirner is unveiling the first major solo exhibition of Nara's work in New York in over a decade — his first at the gallery since leaving Pace last year. Curated by Nara himself, the museum-quality show spans paintings, drawings and sculptures across Zwirner's two Chelsea locations. It pairs works from his student days in Düsseldorf in the 1980s and 1990s with recent pieces, and includes 13 oversized bronze heads enlarged from palm-sized clay models inspired by the snow "monsters" of his childhood winters in northern rural Japan.

The artist, now in his 60s and based in Tochigi Prefecture, about 100 miles north of Tokyo, emerged internationally in the 1990s. His figures' mix of innocence and world-weariness drives the appeal. Takako Nagasawa, deputy chairwoman at Phillips, said the characters "look cute on the surface," but "if you read into them, they're not cute, like the girl who has a knife hidden behind her back." Many collectors, she noted, hang Nara's work in their children's bedrooms. "I think that two-sidedness is the attraction, and very relevant now. We want to talk about what's going on around the world, but we also don't want to talk about it."

Who owns Nara?

Both ends of the market. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, a longtime collector who supported last year's Nara retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery — co-organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden — calls him "one of the most important artists of our time." Benioff came to the work through eBay, buying journals and the artist's "little books" on the Zen Buddhist concept of Shoshin, or "beginner's mind." He now owns multiple works, including a drawing of a grimacing girl reading "I'm just alright," a fiberglass sculpture of two heads in a bowl, and a monumental bronze head. "It's great that I picked them up early," he said. "It's really almost impossible to get anything [on the primary market]. The best pieces all go to the museums."

Nara's imagery also appears in homes featured in AD — a sculpture in Usher's backyard, a painting in Kris Jenner's dining room.

What is selling?

• Nara's auction record stands at $25 million for the seven-and-a-half-foot canvas Knife Behind Back, sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2019.
• Milky Lake / Thinking One, an eight-and-a-half-foot painting of a girl with downcast eyes, comes up later this month on Fair Warning at a $10 million estimate.
• Christie's offers an eight-foot bronze Miss Forest for $1 million in its 21st Century Evening Sale next week.
• Sotheby's sells Candy Blue Night (2001) at a $5 million estimate and the fiberglass set The Little Pilgrims (Night Walking), a 1999 edition, at $1.2 million. Sellers Theodore and Ruth Baum bought that set two decades ago for $360,000.

Can a $12 band-aid and a $25 million painting share one artist?

Nara has actively pushed his imagery into everyday products, and no other merchandised character — not Kaws's Companion, not Jeff Koons's balloon dog — has endured quite like his. The MoMA Design Store sells his $12 band-aids, $85 snow globes and $1,200 table lamps; Chay Costello, the museum's associate director of merchandising, says Nara ranks among the most searched artists on MoMA's website. Yoshiki, frontman of X Japan, is using Nara characters on his Napa Valley wine label, Y by Yoshiki. Stella McCartney, a close friend, has previewed her third limited-edition collaboration with the artist, from $100 shoelaces to a $7,900 knit scarf.

Content creator Nick Lowry, who bought one of the ashtrays 20 years ago for $250 on eBay, recently moved his from coffee table to wall. "Objects like this are one of the only ways to own work by a living artist whose paintings now sell for more than I could ever afford," he said in a TikTok video. The original painting behind the ashtray sits in Miami's Rubell Museum.

The Zwirner show coincides with last week's reopening of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., after a four-year renovation, where three larger aluminum versions of Nara's heads are on view. The gap between museum masterpiece and gift-shop trinket would sink most artists; for Nara, it may be the engine of the whole phenomenon — and the next collector may be scrolling, not bidding.