ลุยกันนนนนนนนน
❤❤❤
ไปสำรวจลิสต์หนังสือ 100 เล่มต้องอ่านให้ได้ในชีวิตนี้ คัดเลือกโดยกองบรรณาธิการของ Amazon.com โดยทีมคัดเลือกบอกว่าต้องการให้ลิสต์หนังสือนี้ครอบคลุมทุกช่วงวัยของชีวิต ลิสต์นี้จึงมีทั้งวรรณกรรมเยาวชน นวนิยายร่วมสมัย วรรณกรรมคลาสสิก และนวนิยายแปลจากภาษาต่างประเทศ
ในลิสต์มีหลายเล่มที่แปลภาษาไทยแล้วนะ: 1984, ประวัติย่อของกาลเวลา, แมงมุมเพื่อนรัก, ดาวบันดาล, บันทึกลับของแอนน์ แฟร้งค์, เรื่องเล่าของสาวรับใช้, ลาลับ, บันทึกนกไขลาน ฯลฯ
100 Books to Read in a Lifetime
1. 1984, by George Orwell
(1984 http://readery.co/9786167196442)
2. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
(ประวัติย่อของกาลเวลา, สนพ.มติชน)
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
(สนพ. Legend Books จะพิมพ์ปลายปี 2018)
4. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah
5. The Bad Beginning: Or, Orphans!, by Lemony Snicket
6. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
(ย่นเวลาทะลุมิติ http://readery.co/9789740211389)
7. Selected Stories, 1968-1994, by Alice Munro
8. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll
(อลิซในดินแดนพิศวง http://readery.co/9786167147130)
9. All the President's Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
10. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, by Frank McCourt
11. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume
(รอวันนั้น, สนพ.กันยา)
12. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
13. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
14. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall
15. Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat
16. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
(โรงงานช็อคโกแล็ตมหัศจรรย์ http://readery.co/9789741404735)
18. Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White
(ชาร์ล็อตต์ แมงมุมเพื่อนรัก http://readery.co/9786161811167)
19. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
20. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brené Brown
21. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1, by Jeff Kinney
(ไดอารี่ของเด็กไม่เอาถ่าน, http://bit.ly/2vVZtZf)
22. Dune, by Frank Herbert
(ดูน : ราชันย์พิภพทะเลทราย, สนพ.คุณพ่อ)
23. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
(ฟาเรนไฮต์ 451 http://readery.co/9786163430816)
24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson
25. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
(เล่นซ่อนหาย http://readery.co/9786162870538)
26. Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown
27. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
(แรงใจและไฟฝัน http://readery.co/9786167147697)
28. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
(ปืน เชื้อโรค และเหล็กกล้า, สนพ.คบไฟ)
29. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling
(แฮร์รี่ พอตเตอร์กับศิลาอาถรรพ์ http://readery.co/9786160417919)
30. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
(ฆาตกร, สนพ.มติชน)
31. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
32. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
33. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware
34. Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain
(Kitchen Confidential สนพ,ฤดูร้อน)
35. Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
36 Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
(บ้านเล็กในทุ่งกว้าง http://readery.co/9786161812980)
37. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
(โลลิต้า http://readery.co/9786168053034)
38. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
(รักเมื่อคราวห่าลง http://readery.co/9786169183303)
39. Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich
40. Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl
(ชีวิตไม่ไร้ความหมาย http://readery.co/9786161803278)
41. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
42. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
43. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
(ทารกเที่ยงคืน, สนพ.เพิร์ล)
44. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
45. Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham
46. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
47. Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen
(พรากจากแสงตะวัน http://readery.co/9786163941565)
48. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi
(แพร์ซโพลิส http://readery.co/9789741662227)
49. Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth
50. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
(สาวทรงเสน่ห์ http://readery.co/9786165087575)
51. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
52. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
(โรงฆ่าสัตว์หมายเลข 5 http://readery.co/9786169069638)
53. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
54. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
57. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
(จอมโจรหนังสือ, สนพ.เพิร์ล)
58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
59. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
(จะเป็นผู้คอยรับไว้ไม่ให้ใครร่วงหล่น http://readery.co/9786168053027)
60. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride
61. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
62. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
63. The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
(บันทึกลับของแอนน์ แฟร้งค์ http://readery.co/9789741404650)
64. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
(ดาวบันดาล http://readery.co/9786168110003)
65. The Giver, by Lois Lowry
(The Giver http://bit.ly/2I1XHKJ)
66. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman
(ธุลีปริศนา ตอน มหันตภัยขั้วโลกเหนือ, สนพ.นานมีบุ๊คส์)
67. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
(แก็ตสบี้ ความหวังยิ่งใหญ่และหัวใจมั่นคง http://readery.co/9786168123041)
68. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
(เรื่องเล่าของสาวรับใช้ http://readery.co/9786168123072)
69. The House at Pooh Corner, by A. A. Milne
(วินนีเดอะพูห์ http://readery.co/9786161804367)
70. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
(เกมล่าชีวิต http://bit.ly/2JAzmJ6)
71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
72. The Liars' Club: A Memoir, by Mary Karr
73. The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan
(เพอร์ซีย์ แจ็กสัน กับสายฟ้าที่หายไป http://readery.co/9786167265117)
74. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(เจ้าชายน้อย http://readery.co/9786169160113)
75. The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler
(ลาลับ http://readery.co/9789742112592)
76. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright
77. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
(ลอร์ด ออฟ เดอะ ริงส์ http://readery.co/9786161807016)
78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks
79. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan
80. The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster
81. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
82. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro
83. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
84. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
85. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
86. The Shining, by Stephen King
(เดอะไชนิ่ง คืนนรก http://readery.co/9786161809263)
87. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
(คนแปลกหน้า http://readery.co/9786168007044)
88. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
(หัวใจโลกีย์ http://readery.co/9786167184517)
89. The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
90. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle
(หนอนจอมหิว, สนพ.แพรวเพื่อนเด็ก)
91. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
(สายลมในพงหลิว http://readery.co/9786161804787)
92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
(บันทึกนกไขลาน http://readery.co/9786167591551)
93. The World According to Garp, by John Irving
94. The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
(ปีแห่งความคิดสุดวิเศษ, สนพ.มติชน)
95. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
96. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
(ฆ่าม็อกกิ้งเบิร์ด http://readery.co/9786161812324)
97. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand
(ไม่มีวันดับสูญ http://readery.co/9786167691169)
98. Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann
99. Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein
100. Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak
(ดินแดนแห่งเจ้าตัวร้าย, สนพ.แพรวเพื่อนเด็ก)
—
100 Books to Read in a Lifetime
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=8192263011
Photo: Sam Machkovech (bookpatrol.net)
同時也有10000部Youtube影片,追蹤數超過2,910的網紅コバにゃんチャンネル,也在其Youtube影片中提到,...
「his dark materials books」的推薦目錄:
- 關於his dark materials books 在 Dek Thai Klai Baan เด็กไทยไกลบ้าน Facebook 的最佳解答
- 關於his dark materials books 在 Arbee Cosplay Facebook 的最佳貼文
- 關於his dark materials books 在 YOSHITOMO NARA Facebook 的精選貼文
- 關於his dark materials books 在 コバにゃんチャンネル Youtube 的最讚貼文
- 關於his dark materials books 在 大象中醫 Youtube 的精選貼文
- 關於his dark materials books 在 大象中醫 Youtube 的最佳解答
his dark materials books 在 Arbee Cosplay Facebook 的最佳貼文
Connected Television Show 的訪問終於推出了~
很感謝他們的邀請~ > < ~
呀~ 很久也沒有寫過這麼多英文了...
要一個英語成績不合格的人去接受訪問,
這已經是我的極限了~ (吐血)
Grammar和串字都錯很大, 還請多多包涵... orz
照片也異常難選擇呢,
有很多照片都想放進去 > <
然後發現...
有很多照片還沒修... Q A Q
(對不起各位攝大大)
再次感謝各位的拍攝及幫助~
才能有這麼好的照片~ //////A//////
(包括有或沒有寫下名字的大家~)
感謝~ >3< ~
CONNECTED COSPLAY: SPOTLIGHTING COSPLAYERS WITH TALENT FROM AROUND THE WORLD! From
Q & A
Name: Arbee
Location: Hong Kong
Occupation: Video Editor, Assistant Producer
Website: https://www.facebook.com/arbeecos
Credits:
Photographers - (Auto Cosphoto, Henry's Cosplay Photo, 白白 Photography, Upita Photography, Cheong
Photography , 坂本龍影像社, EE輝的Cosplay攝影記事, Ghost Cosphoto, Felia Photography, Ka Leung Yip (YKL),
Sum So)
and All Helpers.
When and how did you get started in Cosplay?
When i was junior college student, my friend know that I'm quite interested in cosplay.
So he was invited his cosplay friends to me, and thay told me that how to make the costume and stage
property.
What was your first Cosplay?
Yuna - Final Fantasy X
What was the most difficult character?
ALL characters with large stage property are so difficult to cosplay. (Haha~ > A <)
Whether the production, transport, shooting or storage, there are many problems.
What characters are you planning for the future and type of character are you drawn to?
Kaga / Yamato (Kantai Collection),
Umi Sonoda / Rin Hoshizora / Nozomi Tojo (LoveLive! School idol project),
Sheryl Nome (MACROSS Frontier), etc.
What is your process when starting from the begining with a new cosplay?
First, Find the role of setting , the more detailed is better.
Then consider what materials and methods of manufacturing.
Discuss with friends if necessary.
Are there any helpful hints in sewing, costume design or any other aspects of your cosplay that you discovered
in doing your creations?
Many people post their production process to the internet, which is very valuable reference.
Do you have a preferred brand of make up in your cosplay? And if so why?
I prefer Laura Mercier, MAC Cosmetics, Make Up For Ever
Japan and Korea brand like Dolly Wink, KATE(Kanebo Cosmetics), 3 Concept Eyes (3CE)
What are you listening to?
Ling Tosite Sigure(凛として時雨), EGOIST
Favorite Movies?
A Clockwork Orange, Saw, Star Wars, The Terminal, Avatar, Battle Royale
Favorite Animes?
Saikano: The Last Love Song on This Little Planet, Evangelion, PSYCHO-PASS, Sword Art Online, Code Geass,
Steins;Gate, Elfen Lied, MACROSS Frontier, Attack on Titan
Favorite TV Shows?
The X-Files, Heroes of Cosplay, Sherlock
Is there a scene from a anime, cartoon, movie or tv show that left a big impression on you and what was it?
A lot...
Books?
My Girlfriend's a Geek (novel)
Games?
Final Fantasy , Resident Evil, Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA, Alice: Madness Returns
Beverage?
Chocolate Milk
Fast Food/ Junk Food of choice?
Pizza with chorizo and pineapple
Candy bar?
85% Dark Chocolate
Favorite Breakfast cereal?
Cocoa Krispies
Is there something not going on in the cosplay world that you would want to see or is there something you
would want to change?
I hope every cosplayer like cosplay from heart
What was your favorite toy growing up?
Rabbit Soft Toy
Who is your biggest character crush and why?
All male characters
Not look like a man ... Q A Q
You enter a warehouse. There is little light, but you are able to find your way around. The sound of music draws
you to a corner of the warehouse. There are FIVE GHOUL CLOWNS, playing a dancing video game. They have
razor sharp teeth and scary weapons. Magic can not affect them; they sense your presence and turn facing you.
They run to you to attack. Time to fight! What character would you want to be to defeat them and how would
you handle the situation?
Sakata Gintoki - Gintama
He can defeat many enemies with a single wooden sword, and i could follow and cover him.
If you had to be chained with a character for one year, what would be the character and what would you do?
Sakata Gintoki - Gintama
Have different world of adventure.
You can have dinner with your favorite character. And at this dinner you may ask one question. Who would be
the character and what would be your one question?
Sakata Gintoki - Gintama
"Do you have anything to say to us?" (www)
What's number 1 on your bucket list? (Something you want to do before you leave the planet).
Time travel
What advice would you give to people getting started in Cosplay?
Enjoy and have fun are the most important think. XD
his dark materials books 在 YOSHITOMO NARA Facebook 的精選貼文
Nobody’s Fool ( January 2011 )
Yoshitomo Nara
Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.
But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.
While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.
As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.
In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.
Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.
Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!
I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.
Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.
By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.
After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.
And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.
Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.
But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.
The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.
Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. 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. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.
After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.
Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.
After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.
I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….