Yoshitomo
Nara

Nara was born in 1959 in the city of Hirosaki in northern Japan, and raised in the nearby rural town of Aomori. Born the youngest of three children to working parents, Nara is said to have had a lonely childhood, seeking comfort in music and animals.

As a teenager Nara moved to Tokyo, and then to Nagakute when he was 21 to study art at the Aichi University of the Arts. Later, between 1988-1993, he relocated  to Germany to study at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf before moving to Cologne in 1994. During his time in Germany Nara became absorbed by Neo-Expressionism and punk rock. Both would go on to inform his artistic style.

After 12 years in Germany, Nara returned to Japan to live and work. The artist first enjoyed notoriety as a part of his home country’s Pop art movement of the 90s, creating seemingly simple artworks depicting cartoon-like characters.

Nara’s work is massively popular, enjoying a cult-like status that transcends age, culture, or location. Critics attribute the popularity of Nara’s work to his transmission of nostalgia and angst through childlike figures. Despite their appearance, the emotions portrayed could be applicable to anyone from anywhere. Art critic Roberta Smith has said ‘He seems never to have met a culture or generation gap, a divide between art mediums or modes of consumption that he couldn’t bridge or simply ignore’. Similarly critic Robert Smith described Nara’s work as ’high, low and kitsch; East and West; grown-up, adolescent and infantile.'

Nara is arguably Japan’s best known living artist. He has had almost 40 solo exhibitions since 1984, and his work exists in many major collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Rubell Collection and The Museum of Modern Art.

Nara’s best known works are arguably his depictions of children. Interchangeably sad, angry, menacing, even frightening, and almost always alone.

A figure seen again and again throughout Nara’s work is a young girl with almond shaped eyes and brown hair, often depicted with a single straight line for a mouth and her chin sulkily pushed forward. We see her seated in a blue dress in his 1995 work Hothouse Doll which sold at auction in 2019 for $13.2 million, and again in Midnight Truth (2017) where she stares out at the viewer, challenging them unblinkingly.

Nara is said to take inspiration from children’s books, cartoon imagery and manga - influences that are perhaps most immediately apparent in the visual language of his artworks.

Music also plays a key role in the artist's aesthetic. As a child Nara would listen to American and European music, not understanding the lyrics he would study the album covers for meaning. Through listening and studying the accompanying visuals Nara absorbed the anti-establishment message of this western music at the time, a sentiment that is now clearly  reflected in his work.

Nara is a multi disciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing and painting. His style has been linked to the manga and Disney style cartoon drawing of his childhood, but also to historical Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

In the 2000s Nara's work became associated with a group of Japanese artists who were collectively known as Superflat. Founded by Takashi Murakami, Superflat were known for their bright colours and cartoon style drawing, as well as their commentary on contemporary consumerism, and of the disquiet amongst the youth regarding the rise of Japanese consumer culture. Visually, Nara’s work is separated from the group in its use of a muted colour palette.

Nara’s work mirrors his life experience, reflecting his childhood as a lonely, youngest child of two working parents. The isolated, often unhappy children in his artworks are direct derivatives of this time in his life, and the cartoon style in which they are portrayed is influenced by the various cartoon cultures that he was exposed to as a boy.

Nara has also cited the Japan he grew up in and the period of change undergone by the country as a key factor in his work: 'I was lucky that I lived through a transition period in Japanese society; a time when, for example, I saw the packaging of apples change from wooden boxes to paper bags, or the way miso-making changed from traditional handwork to modern manufacture.'