Yoshitomo Nara and Mark Rothko Lead Sotheby’s ‘PSYCHO’ Exhibition

Sotheby’s Maison in Hong Kong is turning its latest biannual curated exhibition toward the more unsettled corners of the psyche with PSYCHO: Identity Alienation Shadow Duality. On view through September 27, the exhibition brings together museum-quality loans and works from Sotheby’s upcoming Modern & Contemporary Art auctions to examine how identity, obsession, fear, vanity and ambition surface through art and literature.

Drawing on the psychological language of cinema and the written word, PSYCHO positions outward appearances against the tensions concealed beneath them, assembling works by Mark Rothko, Yoshitomo Nara, Tetsuya Ishida, Yayoi Kusama, Hans Bellmer, Lee Bul, Frank Auerbach, Paula Rego and more. Literary touchstones extend the premise beyond visual art, with first-edition copies of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and a 17th-century edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy further tracing themes of alienation, despair and fractured identity.

Anchoring the exhibition and the September 28 Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction is Mark Rothko’s “Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown)” from 1964, a monumental two-meter canvas estimated to fetch between $78 million and $128 million HKD (approx. $9.9 million – $16.3 million USD). Created shortly before the artist’s Rothko Chapel series, its reduced plum-and-brown palette, restrained composition and enveloping scale reflect the increasingly introspective direction of Rothko’s late period, making it a fitting centerpiece for an exhibition concerned with what lies beneath apparently quiet surfaces.

Yoshitomo Nara provides another major focal point with “The Crated Room in Iceland / Drawing Room,” returning to public view after more than 15 years and making its auction debut with a $45 million to $65 million HKD estimate (approx. $5.7 million – $8.2 million USD). Created during Nara’s collaboration with graf, the installation surrounds viewers with a shipping-crate structure filled with 97 drawings, chairs, a CD player and personal objects, alongside a large-scale painting — effectively collapsing the distance between artwork, studio and the artist’s internal world.

Elsewhere, PSYCHO expands its study of psychological and social unease through radically different visual languages. Tetsuya Ishida’s 1996 “Can’t Fly Anymore,” estimated between $6 million and $8 million HKD (approx. $764k – $1 million USD), places his recurring everyman figure inside a rusting pirate-ship amusement ride, turning an image of attempted flight into a meditation on confinement, disillusionment and the uncertainty that followed Japan’s bubble-economy collapse. Lee Bul’s large-scale Heaven and Earth similarly draws personal and political trauma into a disorienting sculptural environment, combining a shattered tiled bathtub, black calligraphy ink and miniature mountain forms with references to Korea’s modern history. Together with works by Kusama, Alicja Kwade, David Altmejd and others, the exhibition frames psychological duality not as a singular condition but as something shaped by personal memory, social pressure, national history and perception.

PSYCHO: Identity Alienation Shadow Duality remains on view at Sotheby’s Maison, LANDMARK CHATER, Hong Kong through September 27, while the Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction takes place September 28, followed by the Modern and Contemporary Day Auctions on September 29. For more information, visit Sotheby’s designated webpage for the sale.