Beyond Cute: The Personal Symbolism of Yoshitomo Nara

Two early paintings, People on the Cloud (1989) and Make the Road, Follow the Road (1990),  immediately dispel expectations of the artist and his now recognizable aesthetic. Made when the artist was studying in Germany between 1988–2000, they have the high-keyed colors and personal symbology and gestures of German expressionism. Asked about how his time in Germany influenced his work in a 2005 video interview, Nara quickly dismissed the idea, stating that the only lasting effect his decade in the country had on him was a confirmation of the isolation that enveloped him as a young child and that has always defined his existence. It is no wonder all of his paintings feature solitary figures.

Political content appears throughout Nara’s oeuvre, such as in No Nukes (1998), painted over a promotional music poster and featuring a pig-tailed, cat-faced girl holding a sign emblazoned with the title phrase. In 2011, the artist allowed his “No Nukes Girl” image to be widely disseminated and used by protesters in mass anti-nuclear demonstrations in Japan. Eerily, Missing in Action – Girl Meets Boy (2005)—named for “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945—was literally missing, as Covid-19 delayed the travel of that particular work. In it, a young girl has heterochromia, due to an atomic bomb explosion reflected in her right eye. Deeply affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, the prolific Nara only completed one painting that year: the grim-faced figure of In the Milky Lake/Thinking One (2011) shifts from the coyly mischievous expressions of previous works to a palpable sadness.

Another major focal point was Nara’s nuanced paint handling, often gone unnoticed due to a distinct style of delineated outlines and pared down, graphic compositions. The half-bust portrait Misty Noon (2018), for example, boasts passages of almost prismatic effect, as sheer acrylic paint is layered over and over again using variegated, sensitive brushwork. The exhibition labels compared Nara’s painting style to abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko, or 19th-century French landscape painting, a seemingly unlikely point one struggled to argue against when lost amid blanketing swaths of misty, dreamy, almost sensuous color and brushwork.

A small clapboard house in one of the galleries piped in iconic tracks from the likes of Dan Penn, Joni Mitchell, and more, and what at first appeared to be a mere diversion or amusement turned out to be a surprisingly apt summary for the artist’s impulses and oeuvre. Peering through the small windows, one could spy an interior strewn with drawings, beer bottles, and souvenir trinkets from Nara’s frequent travels. The dwelling, human in scale and yet too restrictive to actually enter, is like the artist’s mind, work, and life—one can peer through and appreciate a sense of solitude and wistfulness beyond the kawaii exterior, but none can truly inhabit the interior space of individual, personal emotion.

Jennifer S. Li is ArtAsiaPacific’s Los Angeles desk editor.

Yoshitomo Nara’s retrospective is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until July 5, 2021.

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