Yoshitomo Nara

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

The latchkey child of working parents, Yoshitomo Nara grew up in rural Hirosaki, Japan, frequently left with only his imagination, television, pets and toys for company.   There, out of sheer boredom and restlessness, Nara developed a sense of isolation, nostalgia and veiled malevolence which would come to trademark his later work.  Though he began his studies at the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, it was not until 1988, when Nara enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, that this childhood sense of angst began effectively informing his work. Gradually, backgrounds became monochrome and compositions sparer as his artistic vision became more refined and pure. Yet, though his style and surroundings changed, the emotive memory of his youth remained a constant focus. 

Nara’s children have been variously described as fierce, vulnerable, innocent and insolent, which, in his hands, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Born from the confluence of sources such as Japanese manga, anime, punk rock and pop-culture these figures strike an atavistic nerve, resonating deeply across a wide spectrum of backgrounds. For most audiences, in a world of sex, violence, and suffering, children remain bastions of innocence and purity. Yet, these children frequently wield accusatory eyes, devilish smirks and sharp objects, disrupting our sense of their supposed virtue. Thus, like a washing machine of ideals, Nara cleanses and filters us of these preconceptions, presenting us instead with subtle corruption in a saccharine cloak. 

The present work is an immaculate example of this conceptual dualism.  Though a young girl holding a knife is an unsettling notion, it is not necessarily an indicator of imminent evil; perhaps she could be making a sandwich or slicing an apple? Yet, this girl is clearly not participating in such innocuous whimsies. Her eyes stare coolly at us, unabashedly confrontational, scheming and lethal, pupils aglow like an animal’s at night. Her mouth is small and taut, a small line of red betraying absolutely no emotion.  There is a faint trace of blood on her right cheek and an uncomfortable sense that her left hand is not idle, but holding something down. The knife is clean, but sharp and shiny, begging the question: what did we interrupt?  But all is not evil in this little girl’s world. The pearlescent background is light and calming.  Her hands are fingerless, smooth and mitten-like, seemingly incapable of inflicting harm.  Her hair drapes down either side of her head away from her face, lightly rippled, perhaps damp from a bath. Her shirt, short sleeved and soft hued is cheery and gentle.    

These contradictions are what make Nara’s work so inescapably entrancing and eminently thought-provoking.  We are forced to confront our presumption of the remoteness of childhood, acknowledging that who we are now is not so different from who we were then. As a result, we feel camaraderie with Nara’s children and a sense that perhaps we were not so different. Thus, these works become not so much images of others, rather mirrors of ourselves, and reflections on the betrayal of our own lost innocence.