Yoshitomo Nara

Biography

Yoshitomo Nara bought his first record, “Suzie Q”, when he was eight. He grew up in Aomori Prefecture, in the north of Honshu, and listened to Western music on American military radio. Record sleeves, he has said in interviews, were his first visual art. As a student he was surprised to discover that his favourite covers had been made by well-known artists, photographers and designers. He sums up the order of things briefly: “First there was music, then art.”

Nara was born on 5 December 1959 in Hirosaki. He studied at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, taking his bachelor’s degree in 1985 and his master’s in 1987. In 1988 he left for Germany and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf until 1993.

Recognition came in the 1990s, when he began to be counted among the Japanese Pop artists. His subject is deceptively simple and nearly always the same: a child or a small animal, pastel colours, a confident cartoon line, a big head and an almost empty background. Sometimes the child holds a knife or a saw, and its eyes look as if it has just been woken up, or as if it hates someone. Critics like to trace these characters back to the manga and anime of the 1960s that the artist grew up on, though he himself says he has never claimed that manga influenced him. He argues with the public about the weapons too. Look, he says, their knives are small, like toys: could you really fight with those? He sees his children, rather, as surrounded by big bad people with bigger knives. I think the paintings read differently after this explanation: Nara’s child is not attacking, it is holding its ground. Scholars link the characters’ stubborn self-reliance to his childhood in the remote countryside, where the boy spent a lot of time alone, and to postwar Japan, flooded with American comics, cartoons and rock.

Music has never left his work. Nara designed covers for Japanese and American bands, R.E.M. among them, and in 2005 one of his drawings appeared on an album by the experimental band Fantômas. The works themselves contain references to American punk and rock, and punk, rock and folk usually play at his exhibitions.

He has another, less familiar line of work. In 1999 came the series “In the Floating World”, sixteen sheets in which punk characters are drawn over famous Edo-period prints. Later, in 2010–2022, he worked with the master printer Yasu Shibata on woodcuts for Pace Gallery’s print workshop, using mokuhanga, the same technique the ukiyo-e masters had used.

Since 1984 Nara has had about forty solo exhibitions. In 2001–2002 a large exhibition of his work toured Japan, and in 2003–2005 another travelled around the United States. The Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe showed him from 1995, first in Santa Monica, then in Los Angeles and Tokyo. His first major New York exhibition was organised by the Asia Society in 2010. One of his works became part of a window at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.

In 2017 Nara showed his series “Thinker” at Pace Gallery in New York and admitted that he had begun to work more slowly: where he used simply to carry an image he had in mind through to the end, he now builds up layers of paint and searches for a better version, like a cook who won’t rush a dish. The same year the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art put together a retrospective of his work from 1987 to 2017.

From 1 April 2021 to 2 January 2022 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art showed a hundred of his paintings and sculptures made over 36 years. Exhibitions followed at the Albertina Modern in Vienna (2023), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Museum Frieder Burda (2024). Nara’s works are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the museums of contemporary art in Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, and the Aomori Museum of Art. In 2020 Phaidon published a monograph on him.