Cosmic Girl Eyes Open

"Cosmic Girl Eyes Open" is one of a pair of offset prints Nara issued in 2008 together with a companion image of the same figure with eyes closed. The [diptych](/glossary/diptych) structure reflects a recurring concern in Nara's work with the gaze: the same girl is shown in two states, awake and dreaming, allowing the viewer to encounter the more confrontational and the more inward sides of his vocabulary in turn. "Cosmic Girl" places the figure against a starfield ground, a motif that runs through his work from the late 1990s onward and that connects his figures to the lone children of mid-century Japanese ehon. Offset printing allowed Nara to reach a broader audience than his hand-pulled lithographs and intaglios; editions of the cosmic girl were issued at modest size and were widely circulated through museum stores and gallery shops. The 2008 prints were made in the run-up to his mid-career survey "Nobody's Fool" at the Asia Society, New York, in 2010.