Yoshitomo nara

nobodys fool

moved from credit page

Yoshitomo nara

Melissa Chiu and Miwako Tezuka

With contributions from Midori Matsui, Michael Wilson,
and Hideki Toyoshima

Asia Society museum

in association with Abrams, new york
Project Manager, Asia Society:
Marion Kocot
Published on the occasion of
the exhibition Yoshitomo Nara: Contents 7 Foreword
Vishakha N. Desai
Nobodys Fool, organized by
Project Manager, Abrams: Asia Society Museum.
Deborah Aaronson 8 Preface
Asia Society Museum
Designer: Goto Design, New York, New York
Melissa Chiu
Takaya Goto and Lesley Chi
September 9, 2010January 2, 2011 10 Lenders to the Exhibition
Production Editor, Asia Society:
Elizabeth Bell Asia Society, 2010
New York, NY 11 Exhibition Funders
Copy Editor:
Linda Truilo Asia Society
725 Park Avenue
12 Art for Myself and Others:
Production Manager: New York, NY 10021 Yoshitomo Naras Popular Imagination
Jules Thomson www.AsiaSociety.org Midori Matsui

26 Plates 1: Isolation

Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been Published in 2010 by Abrams, an imprint

applied for and can be obtained from
the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8109-9414-0
A Conversation with the Artist;
From S.M.L. to A to Z and YNG; and
Nara Voice selections are translated
by Miwako Tezuka
half title page:
U Dork!, 2003. Colored pencil on paper.
H. 6 38 x W. 8 34 in. (16.1 x 22.3 cm)
Collection of Manuel Emch
frontispiece:
Installation by YNG at BALTIC Centre
for Contemporary Art, Gateshead,
United Kingdom, 2008
of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion
88 Music on My Mind: The Art and
of this book may be reproduced, stored Phenomenon of Yoshitomo Nara
in a retrieval system, or transmitted Miwako Tezuka
in any form or by any means, mechanical,
electronic, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission 110 Plates 2: Music
from the publisher.
Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China
170 A Conversation with the Artist
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Melissa Chiu
Abrams Books are available at special
discounts when purchased in quantity
184 Plates 3: Rebellion
for premiums and promotions as well
as fundraising or educational use. 228 Subject to Change: Yoshitomo Nara
Special editions can also be created
to specification. For details, contact
and American Culture
specialmarkets@abramsbooks.com or the Michael Wilson
address below.

front cover: 240 From S.M.L. to A to Z and YNG

Untitled (1, 2, 3, 4 Man), 2008. Colored Hideki Toyoshima
pencil on paper. H. 14 12 x W. 9 in.
(36.8 x 22.9 cm) 115 West 18th Street
Private collection New York, NY 10011 246 Plates 4: Installations
www.abramsbooks.com
back cover:
top
256 Nara Voice
Untitled (Nobodys Fool), 1998. Water- Selections from the Artists Blog
color on paper. H. 13 34 x W. 10 18 in.
(34.9 x 25.7 cm)
Collection of Peter Norton 264 Biography and Selected Solo Exhibitions

bottom
266 Selected Group Exhibitions
Untitled (Pup with guitar), 19922000.
All works by Yoshitomo Nara are used
Ballpoint pen, crayon, and gouache
with permission. Every effort has been
on torn green lined paper. H. 6 12 x
made to obtain permission for use of the
268 Selected Bibliography
W. 6 in. (16.5 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and images in this publication that are not
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund the direct copyright of the artist. 270 Contributors

271 Photography Credits

Foreword

Yoshitomo Nara has been a crucial figure in the art world since the 1990s,
not only in his native Japan but also around the world. His work crosses
cultural and national boundaries, even as he remains a leader in defining the
scope and direction of contemporary Japanese art. As a leader in identifying
and supporting the latest contemporary Asian art, Asia Society is proud to
present the work of this renowned contemporary artist. It seems appropriate
that we begin this new decade with Yoshitomo Nara, whose works seem to reflect
a complex mixture of vulnerability, anger, rebellion, and idealism that
resonates with our modern world on a universal level.
Asia Societys history with the art and artists of Japan began with
our founder John D. Rockefeller 3rds interest in and passion for the country
and its culture, and we have been intimately engaged with the Japanese art
world ever since. Many of the projects we have presented have been exhibitions
and publications that explore aspects of traditional Japanese arts, from
notable early projects such as Emaki: Narrative Scrolls from Japan (1983)
and Worlds Seen and Imagined: Japanese Screens from the Idemitsu Museum of
Arts (1995); to the more recent The New Way of Tea (2002), Golden Fantasies:
Japanese Screens (2004), and Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in
Prints and Paintings, 16801860 (2008), to name a few. Contemporary Japanese
artists also have figured prominently in our program and have been featured
in recent projects, including Yuken Teruya: Free Fish (2007) and Yoshihiro
Suda: In Focus (2010).
As a unique multidisciplinary organization, Asia Society, in addition to
staging exhibitions, also organizes and presents live cultural performances,
film and author series, and lectures and conferences on policy, business,
and education concerning Asia. With the Yoshitomo Nara exhibition providing
audiences with a greater understanding of the creative process and of new
art, Asia Society continues its role as the leading museum of contemporary
Asian art. We hope that this exhibition and book, along with other Asia
Society programs, lead to a greater awareness of the culture of Japan and will
contribute to a deeper understanding of Japans role in the world of today as
well as in the world of the future.

Vishakha N. Desai
President

7
preface
We think we know who Yoshitomo Nara is. We see his images of destructive yet
endearing girls everywhere it seems, on T-shirts and ashtrays and as figurines.
Yet these cute objects are only one dimension of Naras body of work. Certainly
his art lends itself to reproduction, and Nara is interested in making his
art accessible, but central to all of his works is an emotional intensity that
conveys recurring feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and rebellion, embodied
in the solitary figures of girls wielding knives or sad puppy dogs.
It is no surprise that from an early stage Nara fou nd refuge and
inspiration in music. Youthful disaffection in the lyrics and melodies of rock
and punk appealed to him. In my interview with Nara, which is included in this
book, he says The influence of music on me is far more significant than that
of manga and other things that people often talk about. His interests are not
just centered on American and European bands but also include Japanese bands
such as pop-punk group Shonen Knife.
This exhibition, Yoshitomo Nara: Nobodys Fool, explores the connection
between Naras work and music. The title is drawn from Dan Penns 1973 soul
album and its title song of the same name. Music has been present in Naras
life in many different ways, evident in the YouTube video of him painting in
his studio to loud rock music. He has also designed album covers for The Star
Club, one of Japans first punk bands; the German New Wave group The Birdy
Num Nums; and R.E.M. Rock and punk lyrics act as statements in his work and
as titles for his paintings. Overt music references can be found in many of
the works in the exhibition including drawings, sculptures, and paintings.
Yet Naras connection to music is more profound than these obvious references,
and we hope that this exhibition sheds new light on the spirit of Naras art
practice, one that is characterized by the creation of an internalized world
of his ow n ma king. Here music is one of the many elements that drive his
characters of hapless animals and emotionally injured young girls.
As cocurator for this exhibition, I have had the privilege of working with
Miwako Tezuka, Associate Curator, Asia Society. She has brought a specialized
knowledge and enthusiasm to the project from a Japanese perspective and has
guided many elements of the exhibition. Together we have selected works that
span a twenty-year period, including many of Naras early works created in
Japan that have never been exhibited in the United States. The intention is as
much to show Naras interest in music as to show how his work and iconography
have developed over this period of time. Particularly revealing are his
drawings on scraps of paper, such as exhibition invitations, envelopes, or even
restaurant napkins, which are like visual thoughts. In some we are able to see
the genesis of paintings that eventually become more resolved and delicately
rendered on canvas.
One of the real pleasures of planning this exhibition has been to work
with Yoshitomo Nara. He is an artist full of surprises and contradictions,
and we hope that this exhibition will reveal some of the complexity of his
8 9
practice. In Naras own words, If you look only at the surface, my work will not
really reveal itself to you. We thank Nara for his patience and commitment to
this exhibition. He was a wonderful collaborator and creator. Hideki Toyoshima
also deserves great thanks for collaborating with Nara on the new installation
commission. Toyoshima and his team Ryo Aoyanagi, Yasumasa Konishi, and Takako
Hosoda are to be acknowledged for producing the extraordinary installation
piece that serves both as stage and framing device for Naras works.
Midori Matsui, Miwako Tezu ka, Hideki Toyoshima, and Michael Wilson
contributed essays for this book. Their contributions provide a fuller context
to the understanding of Naras work and the role he has played not just in
Japan but also on the international stage. I thank our collaborators at Abrams,
Deborah Aaronson and Caitlin Kenney, and the book designers, Lesley Chi and
Takaya Goto of Goto Design. I also thank Yasuaki Ishizaka, Sothebys Japan;
Tomio Koyama and Satoko Hamada, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; and Marianne
Boesky and Erica Mercado, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, for their help
in the plan ning stages of the project. It has been a pleasure to work with
them on this project. Thanks also go to the lenders to the exhibition, who
are acknowledged on page 10. I would also like to acknowledge the dedication
of Marion Kocot and Elizabeth Bell, who have produced a fabulous volume for
Asia Society.
I am grateful for the support of many funders, listed on page 11, who made
this project possible.
At Asia Society, I want to acknowledge our President Vishakha Desais
leadership. In the museum, I would like to recognize the many members of
the staff who worked tirelessly to make this exhibition happen, including
Clare McGowan, Collections Manager and Registrar; Jacob M. Reynolds, Associate
Registrar; Davis Thompson-Moss, Installation Manager; Nancy Blume, Head of
Museum Education Programs; Hannah Pritchard, Administrative Assistant; Lara
Netting, Asia Society Museum Getty Fellow; and Eurie Kim, Museum Intern. Others
at Asia Society who should be thanked for their continued support include
Michael Roberts, Executive Director, New York Public Programs, and Rachel
Cooper, Director, Cultural Programs, New York Public Programs; Victor Abud
Hall, Leia Droll, Alice Hunsberger, Emily Moqtaderi, Andrea Petrini, and
David Reid for their fundraising efforts; Bill Swersey and his Asia Society
Online team; and Elaine Merguerian, Charlene Manuel, and Noopur Agarwal for
their work on press, publicity, and marketing.
Melissa Chiu
Museum Director
Vice President, Global Art Programs
Asia Society
Lenders to the exhibition Exhibition Funders

Aomori Museum of Art Critical support for Yoshitomo Nara: Nobodys Fool comes
Elizabeth Blair and Michael Kelter from our lead sponsor, The W.L.S. Spencer Foundation.
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy Additional support provided by:
Lyor Cohen Marianne Boesky Gallery
Mr. and Mrs. Andrew N. Dodge Joleen and Mitchell Julis
Charlotte and Bill Ford Susan Hancock & Royal/T, Culver City, California
Erica Gervais Harold and Ruth Newman
Susan Hancock Toby Devan Lewis
Vicki and Kent Logan Masako H. Shinn
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Globus Family
Peter Norton Agnes Gund
Rubell Family Collection Ise Cultural Foundation
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Japan Foundation
Adam and Iris Singer Elizabeth Blair and Michael Kelter
Yasko and Thierry Port
We also acknowledge with gratitude those lenders The Mary Livingston Griggs and Mary Griggs Burke Foundation
who prefer to remain anonymous.
Support for Asia Society Museu m provided by the Friends of Asian Art; Asia Society
Contemporary Art Council, whose members include Carol and David Appel, Monique Burger
and Max Burger-Calderon, Mitchell A. Harwood, Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison,
Joleen and Mitchell Julis, Helen Little, Harold and Ruth New man, and Cy nthia Hazen Polsky;
Arthur Ross Foundation; Asia: Ideas and Images, endowed by Harold and Ruth New man;
Sheryl and Charles R. Kaye Endow ment for Contemporary Art Ex hibitions; Blanchette Hooker
Rockefeller Fund; National Endow ment for the Hu manities; Hazen Polsky Foundation;
New York State Council on the Arts; and public funds from the New York City Department
of Cultural Affairs.

10 11
hi-res replaced

ART FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS:

YOSHITOMO NARAS
POPULAR IMAGINATION

Midori Matsui

A Vehicle of Contemporary Sentiment: The Unique Role of Naras

Figurative Expression in Japanese Society in the late 1990s

Yoshitomo Naras international reputation has been established

mainly in the context of the new Pop tendency in contemporary
Japanese art.1 His signature style, featuring the image of a
large-headed child with penetrating eyes, is also frequently
associated with manga.2 Naras art, however, has had a different
significance and context of recognition within Japan, which may
not be apparent to spectators abroad. Since his major solo show
in Tokyo in 1995, Nara has been recognized as one of the main
artists who has contributed to the reevaluation of figurative
painting as part of contemporary art practice. The new Pop
tendency, most conspicuously represented by Takashi Murakami,
has appropriated the icons and styles of Japanese popular
art in order to analyze them as cultural representations of
a Japanese postmodern society saturated with popular media.
Naras painting, in contrast, has been considered a symbolic
representation of the dominant feelings of Japanese youth in
the late 1990s and early 2000s, characterized by a sense of
uncertainty about the future, vulnerability, and a yearning
for the innocence preserved in the inner child. Such emotional
tendencies in turn reflect the psychological effects of the
Great Kansai Earthquake and Subway Gas Attack in 1995. This
was a time when many people began to doubt the concept of
linear progress and started to seek spiritual values, which
are frequently associated with childhood memories and the
exigencies of everyday life. At the same time, the style of
his painting unites disparate elements in an emotional whole,
mediated by the imagination of a child or adolescent, which
gives priority to the emotional truth of dream vision over the
rational representation of reality.
Figure 1
Yoshitomo Nara This brief essay attempts to survey the process that led
In the Deepest Puddle II, 1995 to Naras recognition and the establishment of his artistic
Acrylic on cotton
importance in Japan and Asia between 1995 and 2006, documenting
H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. (120 x 110 cm)
Takahashi collection the popularity of Naras painting as a visual representation

12 midori matsui 13
of a contemporary sensibility, characterized by a search for
innocence, while accounting for the artistic significance of
his work as a vehicle of the childs imagination that creates
connection between opposite realms or levels of experience.
Naras first major solo show, entitled In the Deepest
Puddle (1995) and held at Scai the Bathhouse, set the standard
for the reception of Naras painting as the vehicle of a new
sensibility. His paintings of forlorn children with intense
gazes depicted as ba ndaged, aba ndoned, or even cr ucified
evoke a sense of internal strength beneath their vulnerable
appearances (fig. 1). The sculpture of a gentle-faced white dog
too large to enter its kennel suggests feelings of acceptance
and forgiveness. These images force spectators to confront the
ambivalence of their own minds, while simultaneously conveying
the opposite impressions of innocence and experience, anger
and compassion, life in this world and otherworldly existence
or an afterlife. Naras painterly stylewhich is characterized
by powerful freeha nd li nes defi ni n g fig u res agai n st a
white-painted backgrou nd with distortion and ellipsis, and
thick fields of emotionally evocative colors in stri king
combinations, such as red, purple, and yellow, or white, blue,
and goldenhances the symbolic effects of his images. These
characteristics suggest Naras aesthetic and spiritual kinship
with the heritage of eccentric paintings that have created
personal mythologies in the history of modern painting. This
is exemplified by German Neo Expressionist paintings, to which
he was exposed during his schooling at the Kunstakademie
Dsseldorf between 1988 and 1993; Tsuguji Leonard Fujitas
paintings of innocent but recalcitrant children in the 1960s;
and Japanese modernist-inspired illustration for childrens
books in the 1920s and the 1930s.
Critical responses to the exhibition In the Deepest
Puddle were not sensational, but were strongly indicative of
the art medias appreciation of the spiritual content and the
aesthetic purity of Naras work. One reviewer suggested that the
simultaneously innocent and thoughtful look of Naras children
expressed a will to confront the absurdity and cruelty of
contemporary life in search of hope.3 In contrast, the leading
art magazine Bijutsu techo (Art Notebook) featured Nara as
one of the representative painters of pleasure painting, or
kairaku kaiga, an emerging tendency at the time in which the
painter was emotionally involved in the creative process and
themes of his painting, and enjoyed sharing the pleasures of
emotional expression and its aesthetic representation with
the viewer.4
Nara has attracted viewers of quite a different kind
than those who support Japanese New Pop. While Murakamis
supporters frequently expect to find ideological paradigms in
his work for the interpretation of Japanese postmodern culture,
the first enthusiastic supporters of Naras paintings outside
14 midori matsui
professional circles were people who felt disenfranchised from
social institutions, including adolescents having difficulty
in school; they found spiritual solace and encouragement in
his paintings.5 In spite of Naras residence in Germany, which
limited his public exposure in Japan during this time, his
popularity gained steadily between 1997 and 1999, mainly due
to the publication of In the Deepest Puddle (1997) and Slash
With a Knife (1998), books that showed reproductions of his
paintings and drawings. He also made a drawing for the cover
of Hardboiled and Hard Luck (1999), a novel by Banana Yoshimoto.
Yoshimotos novels have had a tremendous impact on young adults
and adolescents suffering from feelings of vulnerability,
disen franchisement, and the inevitability of separation
and death as inevitable truths of life.6 Nara and Yoshimoto
corresponded with each other through letters and in person
during the 1990s, and established the basis for an ongoing
creative partnership that resulted in remarkable emotional
expression in drawing and literature, seen in such books as
Hinagiku no jinsei (The Life of Hinagiku; 2000) and Argentine
Hag (2002).7 During the years between 1998 and 2000, more and
more reviews of Naras books and exhibitions suggested that
his figures of children and dogs were spiritual self-portraits
of the artist and emphasized the power of his pictures to evoke
the immediacy of childrens feelings that his grown-up audience
had long forgotten but that were nevertheless preserved in the
recesses of their minds. These feelings in turn gave them the
strength to accept their own solitude and to understand life
as an inextricable mixture of loss and hope.8
The emotional content and spiritual effect of Naras
art has a strong affinity with the prevailing tendencies in
contemporary literature, film, photography, and underground
comics that favor humanized expression. These various media
seek to reveal the personal meaning of everyday incidents,
look to childhood memories for the sources of and solutions
to present loneliness, and ex plore ways of achieving more
intimate relationships with others. In the novels of Banana
Yoshimoto, young protagonists, who have suffered the deaths
of loved ones, meet sy mpathetic others who help them attain
personal enlightenment and understand the meaning of parting
as a fu ndamental truth of life. In her film Moe no Suzaku
(The God Suzaku), Naomi Kawase also examines the theme of
parting through her depiction of a close-knit family living
in a deserted village in the mountains; based on her own
biography, the film won the Camra dOr at Cannes in 1997. Young
female photographers such as Hiromix and Yurie Nagashima have
captured trivial incidents or portraits of friends and family
members with amateur-like simplicity, immediacy, and lyricism.
Cartoonist Taiyo Matsumoto, in his cartoon narrative Tekkon
kinkurito (Black and W hite), creates a picaresq ue fantasy
of orphans surviving in urban squalor with expressionistic
art for myself and others: yoshitomo naras popular imagination 15

Figure 2
Yoshitomo Nara
Lets Go Home, 1990
Acrylic on canvas
H. 35 34 x W. 35 12 in. (90.8 x 90.2 cm)
Private collection
freehand drawing reminiscent of the underground comics of
the 1960s.9 Such expressions have gained both the enthusiastic
support of their contemporary audience and critical recognition
and acceptance from institutional authority.10
The for mal elements of Na ras pai nti n g a nd d rawi n g
support the spiritual content of his work. His u niq ue way
of con necting apparently disparate images and suggesting a
larger narrative context through elliptical details presents
a multilayered vision of reality and a fluidity of imagination
that evoke dream vision. In my own writing on Nara between 1999
and 2001, I have maintained that the artistic merit of Naras
painting and drawing resides in his technique of juxtaposing
heterogeneous details to suggest emotional totality and evoking
a larger context through fragments. This resembles the two
dominant methods of image formation in dreams, condensation
and displacement, while capturing the undifferentiated state
of a childs psyche.11 Let me briefly reexamine the original
characteristics of Naras figuration that mediate the childs
imagination and the visual rhetoric of dreams, and suggest
a visual heritage that is quite different than contemporary
Japanese anime or popular comics.
16 midori matsui
smaller
The Child as Intermediary of the Phantasmal Imagination: Fluidity
and Multidimensionality in Naras Painting and Drawing
The pictorial recapit u lation of a d rea m v ision th rou g h
condensation and displacement is presented most conspicuously
by Naras paintin g between 1990 a nd 1995. In Lets Go Home
(1990), a creature with a childs head and the body of a fish
flies through an ambiguous space covered with a milky mist;
his head is aflame and a pair of feet stick out of his chest
and kick the air (fig. 2). The boy-fish figure may suggest
the desire of a child rushing to return home before the
sunset, like fish swimming in water, or an animal run ning
on the earth. The merging of different species and realms of
experience represents both the state of being in a dream and a
childs uncertain identity. In the 1991 painting Dog Mountain
in a Vision, a tria n g ula r g reen mou ntai n rises from the
golden earth. Four white dogs are seen climbing up both sides
of the mountain and a gigantic figure of a similar dog hovers
in the milky sky above them (fig. 3). Although the meaning of
the hermetic painting is indeterminate, the image strongly
suggests a vision of the afterlife: the gold earth indicates
a transcendent realm while the figures of dogs clinging to
the edges of the sharp triangle simultaneously evoke pilgrims
and insects clinging to a leaf. The picture thus embodies
the difficult process of spiritual experience and survival.
It presents both a spiritual parable and a reference to a
memory of a specific dog that might have come from anyones
Figure 3
childhood. The coexistence of different moments in time, and
Yoshitomo Nara the intermingling of memory and its metaphorical displacement
Dog Mountain in a Vision, 1991 make the picture an embodiment of the psychic landscape of a
Acrylic on cotton
H. 64 x W. 25 14 in. (162.5 x 64.5 cm)
dreamer or a child. The critic Takaaki Yoshimoto attributes
Aomori Museum of Art, 2675 this condensation of heterogeneous elements, which compress
different levels of experience into one picture, to the ty pe
of imagination governing fairy tales, which in turn may be
attributed to the imagination of children.12
The multidimensionality and fluidity of Naras pictorial
space also encourages the process of random association, a
fundamental function of drawing. In fact, Naras drawing has
much in common with childrens drawings and drawings made
for children. It has a fundamental affinity with the drawings
created for Japanese childrens literature in the 1920s and the
1930s by such painters as Takeo Takei and Shigeru Hatsuyama,
who were trained in traditional oil painting, but were inspired
by the modernist paintings of Kandinsky and the Sy mbolist
drawings of Aubrey Beardsley to invent a unique genre of modern
illustration. Their illustrations accompanied the stories of
authors, such as Mimei Ogawa, who were equally influenced by
English Romanticism and Marxism, and represented the ideal
of the innocence and unregulated imagination of children,
frequently retained in the depth of the adult mind.13
art for myself and others: yoshitomo naras popular imagination 17

Naras drawing is deeply inspired by the illustrations of
Takeshi Motai (19081956), a painter who created illustrations
for literary works during the 1930s, and for childrens books
during the 1940s and the 1950s. In one interview, Nara declared,
Motais aesthetic sensibility found its sources in everyday
life and this makes it sublime, expressing a pure soul that
transcends the difference between western and eastern art. 14
Motais drawin g is much li ke Naras; he uses thick lively
lines to delineate images against backgrou nds composed of
layers of different colors. Th rough bold distortion a nd
an accumulation of heterogeneous elements, Motais drawing
condenses reality and fantasypresenting an ordinary Japanese
landscape pervaded by an otherworldly aura, children merging
with animals or birds, and fairy-tale scenes with religious
associations (fig. 4a,b).
Na ras first solo ex hibition at a public museu m i n
Japan, I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me, was held in 2001 at
Yokohama Museum of Art and traveled to four other venues in
Japan. The exhibition attempted to examine the spiritual and
artistic significance of Naras art for his contemporaries.
Nara organized the exhibition as an integrated installation
made up of images that encouraged visitors to both identify
18 midori matsui
above left
Figure 4a
Takeshi Motai (Japanese, 19081956)
Picture Story Treasure Ship, 1939
Watercolor on paper
H. 9 12 x W. 7 14 in. (24.2 x 18.5 cm)
above right
Figure 4b
Takeshi Motai (Japanese, 19081956)
I am a wild bird, 1946
Watercolor on paper
H. 15 x W. 10 34 in. (38.2 x 27.2 cm)
with the imagination of children and engage in a process of
self-examination. New works in the exhibition included a series
of paintings showing girls on large dish-shaped canvases and
two sculptures that also functioned as fountains: Fountain of
Life, an emotionally evocative sculpture of childrens heads
stacked on top of one another, quietly shedding tears into
a puddle (fig. 5a,b); and Fountain of Sorrow, which depicts
five dogs on a dish shedding tears into a puddle (fig. 6).
Nara also presented Time of My Life 2001, a hut-like structure
with numerous drawings on its walls. The installation served
as a symbol of the exhibitions formal and spiritual aims,
showcasing the spontaneity and indeterminacy of drawing that
lie at the core of Naras imagination. There was also a
room in the exhibition filled with stuffed animals and dolls
created from Naras drawn and painted characters. This was
the result of a project, titled I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me,
which celebrated the outcome of a public collaboration between
Nara and his spectators that embodied mutual commitment while
suggesting the formation of a temporary emotional community.
Widening Circles and Indeterminate Horizons: The Growing
Popula rity of Na ras A rt a nd the Need to Defi ne Its Place
in History
Naras popularity a nd artistic status continued to rise
steadily du rin g the early to mid-2000s. Two large-scale
solo ex hibitions, From the Depth of My Drawer (20045),
and Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z (2006) presented u niq ue
and intimate aspects of Naras creativity. From the Depth
of My Drawer, which traveled to several venues in Japan
and Korea, presented early paintings and drawings, including
many that had never been shown in public before; and A to Z
at the Yoshii Brick Brewhouse in Hirosaki, Aomori prefecture,
projected Naras utopia n ideal of a n artists com mu nity.
Both shows drew a tremendous number of visitors: 60,000 to
85,000 per venue.15 In 2003, Naras partnership began with the
architecture and design collective graf, which resulted in
impressive installations of both shows. For A to Z, the
artist and graf created a structure of corridors leading to
different rooms that almost resembled a house within a gallery;
the resulting spaces seemed to embody the corners of memory,
or an imaginary town where individual huts presented works
by Nara and his fellow artists. The rooms, or huts, connected
to one another through resonant details, reflecting a process
of intimate communication among people sharing artistic and
spiritual values. At Rodin Gallery in Seoul, Korea, the final
venue of From the Depth of My Drawer, numerous accounts
were recorded of adolescents suffering from hikikomori, that
is, young people feeling discon nected from their families
art for myself and others: yoshitomo naras popular imagination 19
new image
Figure 5a,b
Yoshitomo Nara
Fountain of Life, 2001
Fiber reinforced plastics, lacquer,
urethane, motor, and water
H. 68 78 x Diam. 70 78 in.
(175 x 180 cm)
Collection of the artist
a nd school li fe, who h ad come out of seclu sion to v isit
Naras exhibition. The conclusions drawn from this indicate
an identification by disenfranchised youth with Naras art
as simultaneously a representation of their feelings and a
means of their emotional salvation.16
The critical response to Naras art has slowly caught
up with its popula rity. Several publication s attempted
serious assessment of his work in 2001, the year of his solo
ex hibition, I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me. Contributors
to the ex hibition catalog ue emphasized the frag mented
character of Naras work, and his ability to visualize the
undifferentiated perception and fluid imagination of a child
as fundamental characteristics of drawing. They suggested
that Naras artistic merit resides in making what is often
considered the secondary medium of drawing an important means
of expression, by both exciting the viewers imagination and
mediating the unconscious process of image formation.17 Several
magazines published special issues devoted to Naras art with
essays that interpreted his work mostly in the context of
20 midori matsui
new image
the contemporary anime and manga subculture, or noted the
ambivalent meanings suggested by his images of children.18 Such
critical surveys revealed Naras difference from Murakami, who
had a precisely defined critical language to articulate his
critique of the contemporary Japanese art system and pursued
his own counterculture direction, reinforcing the private and
emotional dimension of Naras art.
Naras response to the slow development of a critical
and art-historical definition of his work at home in Japan has
been to emphasize that his art is grounded in a subculture or
popular culture.19
With such expressions, Nara means several
things. First, he emphasizes his belief in the support of the
general public. Second, he regards contemporary subculture as
part of the historical meaning of popular culture, as the
peoples culture. Third, he maintains that ex pressions of
contemporary subculture convey the fundamental emotions of
anonymous people and their resistance to established authority.
He has made these ideas explicit in a number of statements, for
example, I was made famous by the public, not the approval
art for myself and others: yoshitomo naras popular imagination 21
slightly larger and moved
of critics; My artistic expressions are the accumulation of
my personal experiences and are not determined by conceptual
standards based on theory and art history; and We should
rediscover art that exists in what we think of as subculture.
Its stron g a nd real a n y where you bri n g it because its
directly born of the everyday folks [minshu] rather than
of tradition, and related to their everyday life. 20
He has
also said that the formation of his artistic sensibility was
more influenced by childrens books and record jackets than
formal works of art.21 Nara even declared that he does not
have any artistic predecessors, and because of this, he has
paradoxically become part of a contemporary artistic tendency
worldwide that gives more significance to the authenticity
of private experience than the standards of art history.22
Naras independent attitude was recognized as early as 1998
by the art critic Keiji Nakamura as an important part of the
22 midori matsui
Figure 6
Yoshitomo Nara
Fountain of Sorrow, 2001
Fiber reinforced plastics, lacquer,
urethane, motor, and water
H. 26 14 x W. 80 in. (67 x 180 cm)
Collection of the artist
new tendency in contemporary art in which artists no longer
identify themselves as the successors of the avant-garde, but
choose to create artworks as individuals that com municate
directly with other individuals.23
I maintain that Naras art belongs to a unique period in
the history of contemporary art, in which artists have become
bricoleurs of personal details. They assemble fragments of
childhood memory, popular cultural images, music with which
they grew up, and incidents of everyday life to construct an
emotional totality or personal fiction. Although this is a
personal art, it arouses the emotion and imagination of their
contemporaries who stand on the same uncertain social and
cultural grounds as they. In this respect, Nara has an affinity
not only with Japanese artists of his own generation like
Kenji Yanobe and Hiromix, but also with contemporary American
artists like Raymond Pettibon and Elizabeth Peyton. These two
Americans represent the unexpressed feelings of their anonymous
contemporaries much as Nara does for his spectatorsPettibon
through illustrations for his brothers punk rock band Black
Flag, and his art that mixes, in his unique freehand style of
drawing, outdated images appropriated from American comics of
the 1930s and the 1960s, along with philosophical or satirical
writing quoted with some modification from classic texts of
English literature (fig. 7); and Peyton through emotionally
charged portraits of rock singers and historical figures,
her private icons (fig. 8). When Nara uses the word pop to
define the category of his artistic imagination, he is perhaps
referring to art that embodies the collective feelings of
people who inhabit the same time and place as the artist, as
the works of Pettibon and Peyton do.
The historical categorization of Naras art has many
miles to go. I hope, however, the patient task of documenting
the history of the public reception of his artworks and
exhibitions, and the contextualization of his art from a
wider perspective that includes his international peers will
detach Naras art from the problematic association with the
Japanese New Pop, and reveal the more fundamental meaning of
the pop element in his expressions.
Notes
1. 
R aphael Rubinstein, In the Realm of the Superflat, Art in America (June 2001):
11015.
2. 
M argit Brehm, ed. The Japanese Experience: Inevitable (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany:
Hatje Cantz, 2002).
3. 
Nara Yoshitomo: genjitsu o mitsu mer u shojotachi [Yoshitomo Nara: Girls W ho
Look at Reality], Nikkei Art (May 1995): 26.
4. 
Kairaku kaiga [Pleasure Painting], Bijutsu techo 709 (July 1995): 26.
5. 
Hideto Akasaka, Kodomotachi wa naze fukigen kaNara Yoshitomo no sekai [Why Are
Children Unhappy? The World of Yoshitomo Nara], Aera, February 22, 1999, p. 55.
6. 
B anana Yoshimoto, Yoshimoto Banana: An Interview, Feature 2, no. 8 (August
1999): 88.
art for myself and others: yoshitomo naras popular imagination 23
slightly larger

Figure 7 10. B
 anana Yoshimotos novels have won many prestigious literary prizes, including
Raymond Pettibon Kaien magazines New Writer Prize, Izu mi Kyoka Prize for Literature, and
(born 1957, United States) Yamamoto Shugoro Prize, and they have been translated into several foreign
No Title (Every pulsation of), 1988 languages. Kawases Moe no Suzaku (The God Suzaku) won the Camra dOr Prize
Pen and ink on paper at the Can nes Film Festival in 1997. Hiromix and Yurie Nagashima, together
H. 11 12 x W. 9 in. (29.2 x 22.9 cm) with Mika Ninagawa, won the prestigious Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles Award for emerging young photographers in 2001.
Raymond Pettibon
11. 
M idori Matsui, Hirakareta seishin no utsuwahan kaigateki doroingu no shiron
[A Vehicle for an Open Psyche: Toward the Theory of Anti-Painterly Drawing],
Bijutsu techo 52, no. 785 (April 2000): 6371; Miseinen no sozodaisanshutai
genso no yukue [The Creation of the Adolescent: The Direction of the Illusion
of the Third Subject], Bijutsu techo 53, no. 800 (February 2001): 6570.
12. T
akaaki Yoshimoto, Douwa-teki sekai [The Fairy-Tale-like World], in Higeki no
kaidoku [The Interpretation of Tragedy] (Tokyo: Chikuma bunko, 1985), 322.
13. 
S hoichiro Kami, Nihon no dougaka tachi [Japanese Illustrators for Children]
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2006), 3553.
14. 
S ee Yoshitomo Nara, Sakkayori kanshu no shiten [Maintaining the Perspective
of the Public, Rather than the Artist], Fukui Shimbun, October 10, 2001, p.
11. Takeshi Motai is a highly respected Japanese painter and illustrator, who
after traveling on his own in Europe during the 1930s, started publishing
drawings in the literary magazine Shin seinen (New Youth) in 1935, and in 1941
turned to childrens books and magazines, which became a major focus of his
Figure 8 artistic activity. Motai is acclaimed for the artistic originality of his
Elizabeth Peyton drawing, characterized by bold ellipsis and distortion of images, as well as
(born 1965, United States) a fluid mixture of human and animal figures, eastern and western landscapes,
Kurt, 1995 and the realms of the imaginary and the real. He was awarded the Shogakkan
Oil on masonite Prize for Childrens Culture for Childrens Illustration in 1956. The first
H. 10 x W. 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) comprehensive retrospective of his artwork was held in 2008 at Chihiro Museum
Gavin Browns Enterprise
in Tokyo and Azumino, Nagano prefecture, Japan. See Musee Motai, Motai Takeshi
bijutsukan, kioku no kakera [Takeshi Motai Museum, Fragments of Memory] (Tokyo:
Kodansha, 2008).
15. 80,000 people visited A to Z. 85,000 visited From the Depth of My Drawer at

its final venue, Rodin Gallery in Seoul, Korea, alone.
16. Hikikomori is a Japanese term used to describe people who shut themselves

in their houses or rooms, avoiding interactions with others and the outside
world. It is prevalent among young people, though some exhibit this behavior
into middle age. Yoshitomo Nara, Nara YoshitomoKan koku de hikikomori
mo kando no kaiga [The Painting That Made Isolated Adolescents Come Out of
Hiding: Yoshitomo Nara], Bungei shunju (January 2006): 3079.
17. Yoshitomo Nara, Taro Amano, Midori Matsui, et al., I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me

(Tokyo: Tan kosha 2001).
18. R iichi Na kaba, Nara Yoshitomo no kyoki [Yoshitomo Naras Madness], Eureka

(October 2001): 18485; Ryuji Azumaya, Play with Death, Bijutsu techo 52, no.
790 (July 2000): 6569.
19. H ideto Akasaka, Hitei shite mo hitei shikirenai jibun o shinjite, tsuranuke

[Believe and Continue Being Myself Whom I Can not Totally Negate: Interview
7. Y
oshitomo Nara a nd Ba na na Yoshi moto, Ba na nara, Marie Claire (July 2000):
with Yoshitomo Nara], in Asahi Graph, no. 4080 (May 2000): 2324.
198202.
20. I bid., 24; Yoshitomo Nara, Rong u intaby u: Nara Yoshitomo, tabi no tochu de

8. 
Saori Yoshiba, Kioku no soko ni mieru mono [What Can Be Seen at the Bottom of
[A Long Interview: Yoshitomo Nara, in the Middle of His Journey], Bijutsu techo
Memory], a review of the book In the Deepest Puddle, Rockinon (February 1998):
52, no. 790 (July 2000): 44.
139; Noriko Kawakami, Muku na kawairashisa no oku ni hisomu mono, kodomo no
21. 
Atsunori Asao, Yoshitomo Nara: kodomo jidai no kan kaku de orinasu muso kuukan
koro no jibun to taiwa o tsuzukeru [What Lies in the Innocent CutenessHe
[Yoshitomo Nara: The Dream Space Constructed with the Sense of Childhood],
Continues to Converse with His Childhood Self], a review of the exhibition
English Journal 411 (October 2001): 3234.
Walking Alone, Figaro Japon 10, no. 2 (February 1999): 115; Dojidai-jin no
22. A kasaka, Hitei shite mo hitei shikirenai jibun o shinjite, tsuranu ke, 24.

shinsho hyogen [The Expression of the Feeling of Contemporary People], a
23. Keiji Nakamura, quoted in Takeshi Ito, Omoshiro kowai seikimatsu geijutsu

review of the exhibitions Walking Alone and No, They Didnt, Toou Shimbun,
[The End-of-the-Century Art That Is Fun but Scary], Nikkei Ryutsu Shimbun, May
January 26, 1999, p. 6.
23, 1998, p. 12.
9. F
or an attempt to contextualize this correspondence in spirit among different
fields of literary and artistic expression, connecting Nara, Hiromix, Banana
Yoshimoto, and Harmony Korine with the keyword innocent, see Bijutsu techo
53, no. 800 (February 2001). Nara had a conversation with Naomi Kawase (then
Sendo) in The Loneliness of Art, the Loneliness of Film, Marie Claire (April
1999): 5153; Nara reminisces how Taiyo Matsumotos comic Tekkon kinkurito
(Black and White) inspired him to draw and paint many pictures in Germany,
also mentioning his collaborative drawing project with Matsumoto in Boku no
naka no Tekkon kinkurito [Black and White Inside Me], Eureka 39 (January 2007):
8789.

24 midori matsui art for myself and others: yoshitomo naras popular imagination 25
 plates

isolation
A girl standing in an empty field, dogs deep in reverie; these
are the images that populate Yoshitomo Naras work. Early
works from the 1980s show Naras fluid use of his own childhood
memories and imagination in a style of loose drawing and
painting. In the 1990s, he boldly begins to eliminate extraneous
elements in the background to focus completely on his subject
and its emotional world. The period roughly coincides with
his relatively secluded, and artistically fertile, time in
Germany from 1988 to 2000. A childs feeling of sadness when
left alone, an adolescents awkwardness growing up, and the
resulting uneasiness connecting with the outside world are
some of the psychological states that are crystallized in his
work. This general sense of isolation, also felt by the artist
himself, particularly during his time in a foreign land, is
universally understood by audiences of all ages and imbues
his images with a strong affective power.
 this page
Dog Is Mans Best Friend!, 1985
Mixed Media
H. 24 34 x W. 35 716 in. (62.8 x 91 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2669

opposite page, top

There Is No Place Like Home, 1984
Acrylic and crayon on paper
H. 21 14 x W. 28 916 in. (54 x 72.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1871

opposite page, bottom

Futaba House, Waiting for Rain Drops, 1984
Acrylic on board
Each, H. 17 1116 x W. 14 316 in. (45 x 36 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1870

28 29
Flaming Head, 1989
Acrylic on wood
H. 62 x W. 9 18 x D. 10 16 in.
13

(157.5 x 23.2 x 27.5 cm)

Private collection

30
this page, top
Home, 1989
Watercolor, collage on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 5 34 in. (20.5 x 14.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1875

this page, bottom

At Night When Building Blocks Fall,
A Big Tear Drops, 1989
Watercolor on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 5 34 in. (20.5 x 14.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1881

opposite page, top left

Sleepless Night, 1989
Watercolor on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 5 34 in. (20.5 x 14.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1865

opposite page, top right

Somewhere in the Sleepless Night, 1989
Watercolor on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 5 34 in. (20.5 x 14.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1863

opposite page, bottom left

A Gift from Eastern Europe, 1989
Watercolor on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 5 34 in. (20.5 x 14.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1885

opposite page, bottom right

Tiananmen, China, 1989
Watercolor on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 5 34 in. (20.5 x 14.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1872

32 33
 this page
Hannya Neko (Hannya Cat), 1989
Acrylic on cotton
H. 23 58 x W. 39 38 in. (60 x 100 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2596

opposite page
Wo ist deine Mutti?, 1989
Colored pencil and watercolor on used box
H. 10 116 x W. 6 1116 in. (25.5 x 17 cm)
Private collection

34 35
Make the Road, Follow the Road, 1990 Vision of a Pyramid of Dogs, 1991
Acrylic on cotton Acrylic on cotton
H. 39 38 x W. 39 38 in. (100 x 100 cm) H. 25 34 x W. 25 34 in. (65.3 x 65.3 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2678 Aomori Museum of Art, 2666

36 37
 this page
Untitled, 1991
Acrylic on paper
H. 19 12 x W. 13 34 in. (49.5 x 35 cm)
Collection of the artist

opposite page
No Means No, 1991
Acrylic on paper
H. 8 18 x W. 5 34 in. (20.7 x 14.6 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2679

38 39
this page
To the City, Nobody Knows!, 1992
In k and colored pencil on paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 34 in. (21 x 14.7 cm)
Private collection

opposite page
Kapput Pup King, 19922000
Ballpoint pen and colored pencil on
notebook paper
H. 10 34 x W. 8 58 in. (27.3 x 21.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

40 41
this page, left
Topf, 1993
Acrylic and colored pencil on paper
H. 11 716 x W. 8 18 in. (29.1 x 20.7 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2684
this page, left
Untitled (Checkers), 1993
Acrylic on paper
H. 18 34 x W. 13 14 in. (47.6 x 33.7 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2682

this page, right this page, right

Seejungfrau, 1993 Bockdorf, 1993
Acrylic and colored pencil on paper Acrylic on paper
H. 11 716 x W. 8 18 in. (29.1 x 20.7 cm) H. 11 1116 x W. 8 in. (29.7 x 20.3 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2683 Aomori Museum of Art, 2685

42 43
 this page
Abandoned Puppy, 1995
Acrylic on cotton
H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. (120 x 110 cm)
Private collection

opposite page
Last Right, 1994
Acrylic on cotton
H. 39 38 x W. 39 38 in. (100 x 100 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1834

44 45
Untitled, 1994
Acrylic on cotton
H. 35 716 x W. 51 316 in. (90 x 130 cm)
Private collection

46 47
 So Far Apart, 1996
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1928

So Far Apart, 1996

Acrylic on cotton
H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. (120 x 110 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1842

48 49
 this page, top
Upset Kitty, 1997
Mixed Media
H. 18 78 x W. 20 x D. 11 716 in.
(48 x 50.8 x 29 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1851

Untitled (Mask 5/Dogs Head!!/ this page, bottom

Lonesome Baby!), 19922000 Dog from Your Childhood, 1997
Pencil and crayon on printed paper Mixed Media
H. 6 12 x W. 8 38 in. (16.5 x 21.3 cm) H. 15 x W. 17 x D. 18 34 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and (38.1 x 43.2 x 47.6 cm)
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund Aomori Museum of Art, 1850

50 51
this page, left
Sheep from Your Dream, 1997
Mixed Media
H. 18 x W. 20 x D. 11 116 in.
(45.7 x 50.8 x 28 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1848
this page, left
Little Red Riding Hood, 1997
Mixed Media
H. 22 116 x W. 16 x D. 13 in.
(56 x 40.6 x 33 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1849

this page, right this page, right

Round Eyes Pilot, 1997
Mixed Media
H. 18 12 x W. 16 1516 x D. 11 716 in.
(47 x 43 x 29 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1846
Grinning Little Bunny, 1997
Mixed Media
H. 24 x W. 22 78 x D. 14 in.
(61 x 58 x 35.5 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1845

52 53

this page, top left
Fat Lipp, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on
graph paper
H. 5 78 x W. 6 78 in. (14.9 x 17.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
this page, middle
Sheeps Can Never Sleep, 19922000
Felt-tip pen on notebook paper
H. 5 78 x 4 18 in. (14.9 x 10.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
this page, bottom
Untitled (Girl with hair pulled by
a dog), 19922000
Colored pencil and pencil on
lined paper
H. 4 38 x W. 6 in. (11.1 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
54
this page, top left
Untitled (Spaceship with purple
background), 19922000
Colored pencil, ballpoint pen, and
felt-tip pen on notebook paper
H. 2 38 x W. 3 18 in. (6 x 7.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
this page, top right
Untitled (Plant and dog in the rain),
19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on paper
H. 8 78 x W. 4 12 in. (22.5 x 11.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
this page, bottom left
Untitled (Dot girl on blue ball),
19922000
Ink and colored pencil on printed paper
H. 4 34 x W. 3 in. (12.1 x 7.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
55
this page, top Titanic, 1998
Untitled, 1997 Acrylic and colored pencil on paper
Colored pencil on paper H. 11 58 x W. 8 78 in. (29.5 x 22.5 cm)
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm) Collection ofShinya Takahashi

Aomori Museum of Art, 1948

this page, middle

How Yer Doin?, 1997
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1957

this page, bottom

Untitled (Girl in corner on black
ground), 19922000
Felt-tip pen and colored pencil on
graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 78 in. (21 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

56 57

Walking the Longest Night, 1997
Watercolor on paper
H. 11 58 x W. 8 316 in. (29.5 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1959
58
Untitled (Dog with headphones),
19922000
Pencil and crayon on printed paper
H. 5 38 x W. 5 in. (13.7 x 12.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
59
opposite page
From the Expanding Watchtower
(For the Dogs from Your Childhood),
19922000
Ballpoint pen on notebook paper
H. 8 78 x W. 6 in. (22.5 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

overleaf
Dogs from Your Childhood, 1999
Fiberglass, wood, fabric, acrylic paint
Each, H. 72 x W. 60 x D. 40 in.
(182.9 x 152.4 x 101.6 cm)
Collection of Peter Norton

60 61
Just Living in a 2D World, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
H. 57 x W. 70 34 in. (144.8 x 179.2 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

64
this page
Lotta Leaves Home, 1999
Acrylic on paper
H. 28 916 x W. 20 14 in. (72.5 x 51.5 cm)
Collection of the artist

opposite page
Missing in Action, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
H. 70 x W. 50 in. (177.8 x 127 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

66 67
 this page, top
Galaxy and Stars, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on
notebook paper
H. 8 14 x W. 10 12 in. (21 x 26.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

this page, bottom

Tell Me the Story of Your Life,
19922000
Colored pencil and pencil on graph paper
H. 10 x W. 7 58 in. (25.4 x 19.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top left

In the Empty Fortress, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 78 in. (21 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top right

Dont Say Good Bye, 19922000
Pencil on graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 34 in. (21 x 14.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom left

See the Light!, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on graph paper
H. 11 58 x W. 8 14 in. (29.5 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom right

Drawings, 19922000
Ballpoint pen on notebook paper
H. 9 x W. 6 in. (22.9 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

68 69
this page, top
Drawing for Hardboiled and Hard Luck, 1999
Acrylic and colored pencil on paper
H. 9 34 x W. 9 in. (24.7 x 22.8 cm)
Private collection

this page, bottom

Drawing for Hardboiled and Hard Luck, 1999 Drawing for Hardboiled and Hard Luck, 1999
Acrylic and colored pencil on paper Acrylic and colored pencil on paper
H. 10 14 x W. 7 18 in. (26 x 18 cm) H. 14 316 x W. 10 18 in. (26 x 25.8 cm)
Private collection Private collection

70 71
this page
Pale Mountain Dog, 2000
Acrylic on canvas
H. 50 x W. 80 in. (127 x 203.2 cm)
Private collection, New York

opposite page
Girl with Her Head in the Clouds, 1999
Gouache on paper
H. 16 12 x W. 14 in. (41.9 x 35.6 cm)
Private collection, New York

72 73
this page
Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002
Colored pencil on paper
H. 8 38 x W. 4 12 in. (21.3 x 11.4 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

opposite page
Untitled [Tamago (Egg)], 2000
Oil on canvas
H. 47 14 x W. 43 14 in. (120 x 109.9 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

74 75
 PLEASE SILO

Oh! My God! I Miss You, 2001

Synthetic polymer paint and pencil on
printed paper
H. 20 x W. 14 14 in. (50.8 x 36.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

76
Spring Has Come, 2002 My 13th Sad Day, 2002
Acrylic on canvas over fiberglass Acrylic on canvas over fiberglass
Diam. 37 14 in. (94.6 cm); Diam. 70 34 in. (179.7 cm);
D. 5 14 in. (13.3 cm) D. 10 14 in. (26 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York New York

78 79
Gone with the Cloud, 2004 Untitled, 2004
Acrylic on canvas Acrylic on canvas
H. 86 12 x W. 74 34 in. (220 x 190 cm) H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. (120 x 110 cm)
Collection of Charlotte and Bill Ford Collection of Mimi Dusselier, Belgium

80 81
Remember Me, 2005 Home, 2006
Acrylic on paper Acrylic on canvas
H. 55 x W. 55 12 in. (139.7 x 141 cm) H. 28 916 x W. 23 1316 in. (72.5 x 60.5 cm)
Private collection, New York Stefan T. Edlis Collection

82 83
Walking Alone, 2006 Forever Alone, 2006
Colored pencil and ink on cardboard Acrylic on wood board
H. 18 14 x W. 17 78 in. (46.3 x 45.3 cm) H. 11 x W. 16 18 in. (28 x 41 cm)
Collection of the artist Private collection

84 85
As Tears Go By, 2006
Acrylic and colored pencil on paper
H. 53 18 x W. 42 78 in. (135 x 109 cm)
Private collection

86 87
 Music on My Mind:
The Art and Phenomenon of
Yoshitomo Nara

Miwako Tezuka

I was drawing a lot back then. I had no money to buy

canvas because I spent it all buying records.

Yoshitomo Nara recalling the 1980s1

Yoshitomo Nara is a popular artist, idolized and followed by

die-hard fans, and inspiring many people from all walks of life
across the world. His drawings, paintings, and sculptures are
instantaneously recognizable through his signature motifs,
the majority of which are little children and animals. These
subjects are rendered in a uniquely minimalistic man ner,
which many find have an affinity with Japanese manga comics,
anime, and their early modern precursors such as ukiyo-e
prints. No one denies his images accessibility, which is all
too obvious, as Naras kids and animals often straddle the
space of com mercial com modities; from T-shirts, cups, and
key-chains, to book illustrations and CD album covers.
These many manifestations prove Naras willingness to
step out of, or rid his work of, the aloofness of high art.
There is no doubt that he accumulated specialist knowledge of
art during the extended period of time that he spent in art
schools in Japan (197987) and Germany (198893). In hindsight,
however, it is almost as though he underwent formal education
in order to rebel later against everything that schools are
designed to teach, that is to say, the various conventions and
intellectualized notions of art. As many of Naras commentaries
make clear, he felt that the more cerebral his approach to art
became, the less true his works were to what he felt was reality,
or life. He was most comfortable just drawing, painting, and
listening to music. In fact, music was and has been for a long
time an enormously important part of this artists life, and
Figure 10a
Yoshitomo Nara it cannot be separated from his work as an artist.
NYC!, 2002 When we position Nara solely within the context of
Drawing on front door of Ushio and
contemporary Japanese artas has been done in many recent
Noriko Shinoharas residence in
Brooklyn. Drawings underneath are exhibitions, curatorial essays, and theoretical workswe end up
by Alex Shinohara with a limited perspective on the artist. First, ideas concerning

88 miwako tezuka 89
 slightly smaller slightly larger and moved

the subculture of manga and anime overwhelmingly dominate Figure 10b

View of Ushio and Noriko
discussion of todays art in Japan, leaving us with only a
Shinoharas residence in Brooklyn.
partial understanding of the overall environment in which Nara Naras drawing NYC! (2002) is
works. Moreover, such a perspective does not let us see the seen on the front door.

figure of this impassioned artist in his studio, blasting music,

fervently drawing his images with real emotional depthcreating
figures that breathe ecstatically or contemplatively, and that
also often bleed. This essay challenges the flat understanding
of Naras work as yet more evidence of the effect of manga and
anime on contemporary Japanese art. It does so by casting light
on his longtime love of music as a fertile source of inspiration
that is directly and indirectly manifested in his work.

Nara and Music

Figure 9
After licking the pencil lead,
Ushio Shinohara, from Rokabiri gaka
after giving it a good lick [Rockabilly painter], Shukan Sankei
[Weekly Sankei], April 27, 1958

After pushing the Play button on the remote,

after the usual count-off rings through the room
Tokyo, stood out from the crowd with his Mohawk hairstyle,
1, 2, 3, 4! and became known for his Boxing Painting series, literally
making artwork by punching fiercely at large canvases. For
Even if I cant find anything to draw this daring attitude that appeared to reflect the unruly
I wait there at my desk youth culture of the time, Shinohara gained the title of
rockabilly a rtist 3
(fig. 9). His u nbridled spi rit of
It doesnt matter whether I see something or not rebellion also led him in the mid-1960s to challenge the
As if I were twisting my head into a crack notion of originality in art and to create a new genre
in time of art he termed Imitation Art, utilizing appropriated
I push my pencil across the paper images of mass-produced commodities and even works by such
Even when my right hand isnt shaking hands with established artists as Robert Rauschenberg, which reflected
my left, the influence of the United States. In short, Shinohara
I know theyre clearly linked. illuminates one facet of Japans own breed of pop art that
addressed the issue of materialism and the political and
Yoshitomo Nara2 cultural relationship of Japan and the United States.
Taking into account this culturally specific context, the
Nara is a representative Neo Pop artist of 1990s Japan. Pop major artistic trend of 1990s Japan was quite appropriately named
art, as it is classically defined, signifies various strategic Neo Pop, as it was the second coming of Pop art; however, this
assaults on high art, as first made by British artists such time it came with a completely new object of interest: Japans
as Richard Hamilton, who integrated elements from popular subculture, particularly manga and anime. Neo Pop flourished
culture into his art, thus prompting the birth of the term as the artists of the subculture generation who had spent their
Pop art in the 1950s. Pop art caused a paradigm shift in the childhood years in the 1960s, such as Yoshitomo Nara (born 1959)
field of visual art once artists such as Andy Warhol, in the and Takashi Murakami (born 1962), came of age and became the
1960s, fully appropriated the system of mass-production. main players in contemporary art. Japans Neo Pop has since
In Japan the critique of high art, which targeted grown into a globally influential artistic phenomenon, affecting
academicism in particular, bega n q uite independently, artists across the world, commanding market interests, and by now
fueled by artists who rejected being pigeonholed into the acquiring canonical legitimacy as Neo Pop with capital letters.
conventions of the 1950s. For instance, Ushio Shinohara, who How then, can Naraan artist who in his heart shares the anti-
became a major presence in the 1960s Anti-Art movement in establishment sentiment of his predecessors, like Shinohara

90 miwako tezuka music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 91
slightly smaller and moved
keep his edge in the sleek, anime-like flatness of Japanese Neo
Pop (fig. 10a,b)? Music plays a major role for him as artistic
inspiration and also as an ethical sounding board.
Nara has frequently mentioned his longtime passion for
music. Since his teenage years he has shown proclivity toward
minor music labels and has searched for music and musicians
with less mass appeal. For example, in the early 1970s while
his school friends were under the spell of the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones, Nara was rather fascinated by such cult figures
as Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, Neil Young, David Bowie in his
Ziggy Stardust incarnation, and so forth. It was also around
this time that he acquired some of the first additions to his
now-enormous record collection. When it comes to music, Nara
has always preferred anti-commercial and anti-establishment
bands and musicians; this musical taste naturally led him to
dismiss rock bands from major labels and to discover punk music
in the late 1970s. In 1974, the Ramones, one of Naras all-time
favorites, came upon the New York punk scene with their first
performance at CBGB, while a transatlantic implantation of this
rebellion against corporate-model rock n roll to the United
Kingdom resulted in the success of such representative U.K.
punk bands as Sex Pistols and The Clash. Almost simultaneously
in the latter half of the 1970s, some young and experimental
musicians in Japan, energized by this new punk sensibility and
aesthetic began to make their statement in attitude in Japans
music scene. (Fashion always holds the utmost importance in
the transplantation of foreign cultures in Japan.)4
92 miwako tezuka
hi-res replaced
Nara was in sync with this attitude in the mid-1970s:
hardly a model student, often absent from school, and following
the music of pre-pun k heroes such as Iggy Pop. His fan
activities, interestingly, took the form of not only attending
concerts and buying albums, but also painting imaginary album
cover art and drawing pictures of his rock star idols. There
is no shortage of similarly direct associations between Nara
and the world of music in the following decades; these range
from Nara himself performing as a musician during his college
years as a member of the band Kazoku Keikaku (The Family
Plan; its music was in the same vein as the New York Dolls),
to providing album art to bands such as The Star Club, Shonen
Knife, and R.E.M., to name just a few (figs. 11 and 12). Nara
Figure 12 had always considered album art an important form of visual
R.E.M., Ill Take the Rain, 2004 art born of a collaboration between sound and image, even
Cover art by Yoshitomo Nara
before he started to receive commissions for it as an artist.
Nara has even taken part in recordings by the aforementioned
veteran Japanese punk band from Nagoya, The Star Club. His
adoration for rock figures, such as Japans recently deceased
rock legend Kiyoshiro Imawano (19512009), adds to the list of
his fan interests. Naras frequent blog entries on subjects
related to music further reveal a colorful image of this
artist as a devout music fan.5
Figure 11 As evidenced by the frequent appearance of fragments of
Yoshitomo Nara punk and rock lyrics in his works and their titles since the
Pyromaniac Day and Pyromaniac Dead
1980s, Nara was consuming the music and was consumed by the
of Night, 1999
Acrylic on canvas anti-establishment spirit of punk and New Wave (post-punk),
Each, H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. identifying with its emotional intensity. By the time he left
(120 x 110 cm)
Collection of Lyor Cohen
for Germany in 1988 to attend the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf,
Naras love of music, along with his adolescent years hobby
of writing poetry, had fully migrated to another medium,
drawing. The physical and temporal immediacy that Nara found
in the execution of drawing made it well suited for the
spontaneous expression of raw emotions. It is this nature of
live engagement in Naras work that directly aligns him with
musicians, whose trade allows them a physical relationship
with their medium, sound. Independent curator Takashi Azumaya
described this affinity:
As though to exalt himself, a rock musician can
share mental impulses with his audience in real
time depending on the beat or the warped guitar
sound he plays. Likewise, Nara realizes something
within his inner self as he uses his materials
and simple images. His materials are his guitar,
while images are his melody, his beat.6
Nara created his very first album art in 1990 for The Birdy
Num Nums, active in the German New Wave music scene of the
late 1980s and the early 1990s. During the mid-1990s he
music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 93
 Figure 13 the early 1990s (Fig. 13). Naras figures of small children and
Yoshitomo Nara
animals stand alone in an empty space without any geographical
The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand,
1991 or temporal specificity that requires sets of codescultural
Acrylic on cotton or otherwiseto decipher. They are minimally figurative and
H. 59 116 x W. 55 18 in. (150 x 140 cm)
Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan, fraction and
highly abstracted images. In short, his children, dogs,
promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
and other creatures are presented barefaced, without any
symbolic expression that implies a message or an intention
to communicate.8 Nara tries to rid them of such coding, and
instead, extracts the kind of authentic experience a child
has just before he or she becomes a syntactical existence
that acquires meaning only in relation to others, a society,
an environment, culture, and history. Nara explains that
he is searching for his real reality: the first experience
of heat, the first experience of sweetness, the first
experience of sadness, and the first experience of being
bullied or bullying...Im not particularly expressing a
message to others. 9

The fewer details Nara depicts, the greater the audience

he reaches, but this alone would not have been enough to turn
his audience into fans and to further solidify the bond of his
fandom. Often accompanying the images in his numerous drawings
are fragments of lyrics taken from rock and punk songs: the
title of the drawing Blitz Krieg Bop, for example, is an obvious
reference to the Ramones; and the phrase kind of sucks never
having money, but kinda cool to choose a dream, which recurs
in his drawings, is taken from a song by California punk band
Atomic Boy (fig. 14). Many of his larger paintings are also
entitled with phrases or references to songs or musicians of
his liking: his painting entitled Its Better to Burn Out refers
to Kurt Cobain as well as Neil Young; the title for White Riot
gained increasing exposure within the art scene, with gallery is taken straight from the title of a song of major importance
exhibitions in Germany and in Japan, while his music mania by The Clash; and so forth. A symbolic depth in Naras work is
became known to some Japanese punk bands, such as Shonen discovered with pleasure by the knowing audiences who read these
Knife and The Star Club, who then commissioned him to create texts. While the images are intentionally devoid of symbolic
their album covers.7 Quite unintentionally, Nara enhanced expressions, the words fill in the gaps in the minds of his
the spread of his reputation by reaching audiences from both audience with poetry, sounds, and even the exalted feelings felt
the music world at the forefront of popular culture, and the during live performances. They are mnemonic devices surrounding
art world, which is often equated with high culture. At this a single image and can be woven together selectively by each
unique intersection of high and low, his fandom began to individual, making the viewing of the work an intimate and
form. For instance, the catalogues In the Deepest Puddle (1997) personal encounter, a kind of Proustian experience. Such an
and Slash with a Knife (1998) from Naras solo exhibitions affective reaction is what essentially makes a fan.10
have become cult objects. The growth of his fan-base was Naras fandom is built on the common practices of
greatly accelerated again in 1999 when he began blogging on identification with a star; fans seek proximity to Nara
the website Happy Hour, duly named after Shonen Knifes album through going to exhibitions, and reproducing that experience
title. The website was, in fact, initially put together by by chatting on the Internet or by collecting fan objects such
one of Naras fans and was not supported by any art-driven as CDs with Naras album art or other items he has designed.
business establishment, a phenomenon keeping true to Naras Indeed, Nara has offered an abundance of replicated experience
denial of the corporate business model of operation. for his fans by contributing illustrations to novels by such
What solidifies and expands this fandom are the accessible popular writers as Banana Yoshimoto, and has published a
and unforgettably cute images Nara has been creating since childrens book entitled The Lonesome Puppy, written and

94 miwako tezuka music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 95
larger

Figure 14 author to the viewer. This may seem to diminish the presence of
Yoshitomo Nara
the artist. On the contrary, Yoshitomo Nara has already become
Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002 an icon with an enormous and ever-growing fandom.
Colored pencil and graphite on paper
H. 10 12 x W. 8 in. (26.7 x 20.3 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York
The Nara Playlist and the Spirit of DiY

A.L.Lloyd / Leviathan
Alabama State Troupers / Road Show
Alan Gerber / Alan Gerber Album
Al Anderson / Al Anderson
Al Kooper / I Stand Alone
Al Stewart / Year of the Cat
Al Stewart / Orange
Alan Hull / Pipedream
Albion Country Band / Battle of the Field
Albion Dance Band / The Prospect Before Us
Alex Taylor / Dinnertime
Allman Brothers Band / Fillmore West
Allman Brothers Band / Eat A Peach
Alvin Lee & Mylon Le Fevre / On The Road To Freedom

from Yoshitomo Nara, My record collection

(pre-punk)12

One of the main methods through which Nara communicates with

illustrated by the artist himself. In terms of making work
for anxiously awaiting true fans, Nara has no hesitation in
providing images for mass consumption. Needless to say, the
products on which his kids and animals often appear do not
demand intellectualization. But, even in the form of his
larger-scale paintings, he asks that viewers take his images
at face value and do not philosophize what they see as high
art; the paintings demand a naked emotional response.
Naras art, in short, asks for self-reflection on the
part of the viewers. Art for arts sake is replaced by art for
peoples sake. In this sense, his is pop art of a new sort,
going against the purity of high modernist forms and aesthetics
that stand in contrast to kitsch.11 Nara channels the audiences
emotions, and the empathetic attachment and sympathy that many
develop with Naras work stem from this shift of focus from the
his fans, particularly Japanese fans given that it is written in
Japanese, is his blog Nara Voice.13 For an artist who opens his
studio space only to those who are the absolute closest to him,
Nara Voice is a surprisingly candid expos of his life, and as
such, its effect on his fans and the formation of a kind of cult
of personality should not be overlooked. From his blog entries,
it is clear that art and music are intimately interwoven in
Naras daily life. For instance, a report of his installation
work in Australia might be followed, a few days later, by
comments on a meeting with family members back in Aomori, then
again a week later, by an entry excitedly reporting his recent
experience of a rock concert elsewhere in Japan. One of the most
extensive blog entries to datein fact, multiple entries written
over five weeks from April 16 to May 24, 2009consists of a list
of Naras favorite records from his pre-punk period, sorted
in alphabetical order, along with his recollection of a night in
1977, when he first heard the Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Clash,
and Bob Marley on the radio. Those entries were perhaps the most
revealing of his personality, as this playlist of sorts tells
his personal history by relating it not only to a certain moment
in his past but also to zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.14
The rise of punk music in the late 1970s marked a time
of change in Naras personal history. This musical revolution
in popular culture is often interpreted as the summation

96 miwako tezuka music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 97
moved
Figure 15
The Ramones, January 1976
of the rebellious spirit of youth who saw the distressing
aftermath of the 1960s student movement as hippie culture
was absorbed during the 1970s into the mainstream, and the
Vietnam War evolved into a hopeless mess. At the same time,
an oil crisis in 1973 brought on one of the worst economic
recessions in history. In the context of the time, the punk
movement reconstituted the platform of protest set up by the
preceding hippie generation as an expressive force field where
concerns of culture, society, politics, and economy converged.
Writing in 1979, artist Dan Graham made an analogy between
the mode of expression of 1960s Pop artists and that of 1970s
punks, particularly Devo and the Ramones, and identified their
common target as the myth of individualism and the hegemony
of profit-driven corporate capitalism that manufactures that
myth. In the case of the latter generation, Graham understood
that they prefer to package themselves rather than be packaged
by the media or the record industry (fig. 15). Graham further
analyzed punks use of editing, appropriating, and remixing
of existing materials as a corrosive attack on the conventions
of the music industry (and by extension, of consumer society)
and the spectators passivity in favor of a do-it-yourself
production of spectacle.15
It was, indeed, this do-it-yourself spirit that propelled
the youth of the 1970s to pick up their own musical instruments
even without formal training, and to create their music in
the way they wanted. In Japan, according to sociologist and
cultural theorist Yoshitaka Mori, through what he coined
as the DiY culture of the late 1970s and the early 1980s,
98 miwako tezuka
Japanese youth reclaimed their autonomy by establishing
an alternative method of communication and distribution
of information, in part enabled by the spread of cassette
tapes. (I have adopted Moris use of the acrony m DiY, which
is spelled with a lowercase i in order to differentiate the
principle of do-it-yourself as a cultural movement with
pun k lineage, from DIY, an acrony m often used to mass-
market various materials, tools, and how-to guides.)16 This
rebellious mode of operation among the youth generation in
various parts of the world essentially represents the pun k
spirit, and as both Graham and Mori succinctly illustrate,
unlike the 1960s student movement, DiY was a movement with
a less strictly political nature, but one with a strong
relation to cultural context and to the interests of a
growing media society.
This cultural context of the late 1970s to the early
1980s, the height of punk culture, had a definitive influence
on the development of the artistic stance, or even ethics, of
Yoshitomo Nara. Punk culture proclaimed its alliance to freedom
of expression even if it was criticized for its amateurism or
was simply dismissed as a juvenile outpouring of passion and
frustration. What was important to punk youth remained the
spirit of DiY and the refusal to accept mainstream corporate
factories feeding cultural products to passive audiences.
This rebellious attitude echoes strongly in Naras motto, a
phrase that appears often in his work and writing, never
forget your beginners spirit. It is a credo that constantly
reminds him of working directly from his internal urges and
not in response to external demand, whether this demand is
the expected division between high art and popular culture,
or the market expectations of his style of work.17
Today, history seems to be eerily repeating itself, and
some popular music critics in Japan have even forecasted a
revival, or rejuvenation, of punk spirit under the contemporary
cultural and economic conditions. From a particularly Japanese
perspective, Yoshitaka Mori explains that since the burst of
the bubble economy in the 1990s, there has loomed a feeling
that everything is over, and that nobody has any control
over the course of decline as long as people depend on the
existing, but proven to be dysfunctional, system provided by
industry and government. People started to sense that what
we think of as our own everyday life isnt really ours.
Mori detects that this recognition of lost autonomy has been
motivating some people to revive focus on the DiY spirit,
particularly since the coming of the new millennium.18 It may
be possible to consider Nara as a phenomenon that corresponds
with or prefigured this zeitgeist of the new millennium.
His decision to stay in Germany was propelled by his urge
to find his own time and space, away from the everyday life
that did not feel fully his own. In this foreign land where
music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 99
 slightly larger

he faced a language barrier, Nara ultimately found his voice

in his signature-style works. His collaboration with music
in producing album art, and communicating directly with the
public through Nara Voice have both allowed him to present
his works and thoughts while avoiding full subjugation under
institutional or commercial control. He once recalled his
state of mind at the beginning of his journey as an artist:
I had no desire to show my work [at museums and galleries].
I just had this urge to paint and put my feeling into
some kind of expression, but not through something like an
exhibition.
19
This is the beginners spirit to which Nara
always returns.

Jamming with Nara

Exhibitions, starting my homepage, reviews in

magazines, all these things made me become aware
of my own activities, and I began to think that
I must walk on the real streets. I used to be
scared of facing the real streets, and I was
escaping into the streets of the past out of fear.

Yoshitomo Nara, July 200020

The social dimension of Naras work has been growing since his
return to Japan from his relatively ascetic lifestyle in Germany
from 1988 to 2000. One trigger to this direction seems to have
come with the use of his website and blog. The public nature of Figure 16a,b
such domains, although in a virtual space, has clearly brought Yoshitomo Nara + graf
Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z, 2006
Nara to face a new horizon, expanding far outside of his studio,
Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki,
or, more accurately, expanding his studio far into the outside Aomori prefecture, Japan
world. From this perspective, an institutional environment like
a museum might be seen as an increasingly unlikely site of
imagination and creation. There is, however, a way to follow
the spirit of DiY by rethinking conventional space just as the
punk movement developed a way to create alternative spaces by
mimicking, or hijacking, existing spaces of media and display,
from printed media like newspapers and magazines to physical
spaces like empty garages, parking lots, and apartments. An
extension of this strategy of culture jamming is seen in
Naras more recent engagements with large-scale installations
that call for the participation of the public.21
The year 2001 was a turning point for Nara in that his
first major solo exhibition, I Dont Mind, If You Forget
Me, took place at the Yokohama Museum of Art, followed
by a national tour in Japan with a final show in 2002 at
the Yoshii Brick Brewhouse in Hirosaki, Aomori prefecture,
Naras hometown in northern Japan.22 The grand tour generated
much media coverage that popularized the catchphrase the

100 miwako tezuka music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 101
slightly smaller

opposite page, left community volunteers, and financial support came only from
Figure 17a
local individuals and businesses, instead of depending on
Yoshitomo Nara
U-ki-yo-e, 1999 public funding, which was a more common practice in Japan for
Oil on book page art exhibitions.24
H. 16 58 x W. 13 in. (42.4 x 33 cm)
Collection of Eileen Harris Norton
The 20012002 exhibition spawned a sense of revived
community and the realization of autonomous creative power
opposite page, right
Figure 17b
that was different from one that is administered, controlled,
Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese, 1753?1806) and subsidized by regional or national government authorities.
The Light-hearted Type (also called A fertile potential emerged from this democratic, social
The Fancy-Free Type) (Uwaki no so),
from the series Ten Types in the
engagement for future activities in arts and culture that
Physiognomic Study continues to rejuvenate the region today. The local organizers
of Women (Fujin sogaku juttai) exhibition statement ended with a vision of hope: We hope that
Japan, Edo Period, ca. 179293.
Woodblock print; in k, color, and mica
this background information will give you a fresh perspective
on paper on art and the role art can play in a community. 25

H. 14 78 x W. 9 78 in. (37.8 x 25.1 cm) The largest culture jamming that Nara has realized so
Asia Society, New York:
Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection, far was his 2006 exhibition, Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z,
1979.219
again at the Yoshii Brick Brewhouse (fig. 16a,b). The exhibition
In 1999, Nara created series of works was a mind-boggling feat that brought together more than
titled U-ki-yo-e, also known as the
130,000 volunteers (from all over Japan, from other parts of
In the Floating World series, in which
he chose sixteen Japanese ukiyo-e Asia, particularly Korea, and some even from Europe) to create
masterpieces. He drew on reproductions twenty-six house-like installations, corresponding to all the
of the works and then made color
letters of the alphabet, from A to Z. The project also included
copies of them, his modern-day
printmaking technique. One of those a couple dozen other substructures and myriad displays of works
sixteen works is Naras makeover of by Nara and collaborating artists. The enormous village that
the late eighteenth-century beauty
Nara and his main collaborator, design unit graf, built with
by Kitagawa Utamaro. An original
ukiyo-e print of this famous work is volunteers was a bricolage in many senses: they often made do
in Asia Societys Mr. and Mrs. John D. with available materials, worked according to an organic thought
Rockefeller 3rd Collection.
process rather than strictly engineering all the details, and
year of Narakami, summing up the rapidly growing popularity the creative role of each participant fluidly changed from
of two artists with personalities quite opposite from each time to time.26 A to Z came together essentially as a sort
other, Nara and Takashi Murakami, who also had a major of folk art shared by many everyday folks, and during its
solo exhibition at Tokyos Museum of Contemporary Art in three-month-long run, it attracted 80,000 people to this small
the same year.23 The significance of Naras 2001 exhibition, town located hours away from Tokyo, Japans cultural center.27
which included around forty new drawings, paintings, three- What made this so-called miracle exhibition possible was the
dimensional works, and installation pieces, is twofold: it was magnitude of Naras popularity and the enormous ability of his
Naras first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan; secondly, fandom to mobilize itself to work together for a shared ideal
it grew into a unique social experiment when it reached and goal even without having had any formal art training, an
Hirosaki. The last venue, the Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, was not extreme manifestation of the spirit of DiY.
a conventional museum space, as in previous tour locations,
but an alternative art gallery converted from a former apple
liquor brewery. In fact, the repurposing of this old building From Punk to Folk
was under discussion among the locals for over ten years, and
the final decision to turn it into an art space was reached in We should rediscover art that exists in what
order to accommodate Naras exhibition. The oldest brewery of we think of as subculture. Its strong and real
its kind in the country, the massive brick building was devoid anywhere you bring it because its directly born
of institutional infrastructure, and it immediately inspired of the everyday folks (minshu) rather than of
Nara to expand the aim of the exhibition. What started as an tradition, and related to their everyday life.
introduction of his work to Japanese audiences turned into an
occasion for engaging Hirosakis local community in a variety Yoshitomo Nara, July 2000 (fig. 17a,b)28
of ways. The exhibition was organized and installed solely by

102 miwako tezuka music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 103

Beyond the iconic image of this artist and his individual works,
one may question the reason why such a populist phenomenon is
happening today around Yoshitomo Nara. The difference between
this 1990s Neo Pop artist and the 1960s Pop artists may be in
their manner of engagement with the everyday environment. Roy
Lichtenstein once claimed that Pop looks out into the world;
it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad,
but differentanother state of mind. 29
While appropriating
images from outside the conventions of fine art, classic Pop
artists kept an ironic poker face amidst the busy culture
industry. In the case of Nara, however, he does not seem
to accept easily the worldly environment as is; he and his
subjects of children and animals are deep in the vernacular
and emotionally engage or identify with the people in it.
Making a timely parallel to Naras move toward the socio-
democratic sensibility, there has been an increasing awareness
of an emerging civic society in Japan since the new millennium.
This was already predicated in the decentralization of the
Japanese art scene that began in the late 1990s with the
proliferation of art projects in rural or regional cities (Toride
Art Project, Hiroshima Art Project); the countryside (Echigo-
Tsumari Triennale); and remote islands (Naoshima Art Island)
namely, anywhere outside Japans cultural center, Tokyo. These
art projects demonstrate the belief in the social role of art
that is integral to local communities, environment, and the
cultural economy without (or with little) top-down legislative
control.30 Such a belief is essentially a refrain of Naras view
on the strength of the subculture that emerges from everyday
life. In this subculture, patrons are the everyday folks,
104 miwako tezuka
not authorities. One probable trigger of this tidal change
was the establishment of the new Law to Promote Specified
Nonprofit Activities in 1998. By this law, citizens proactive
social and cultural initiatives were recognized as a vital
force in the creation of a civic society. Numerous certified
nonprofit organizations have sprung up in the past decade, in
fact, including Harappa, which was born out of the volunteers
involved in Naras exhibition I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me
in Hirosaki.
W hile pu n k music remai n s a n i mporta nt pa rt of his
inspirational source, Nara has started to reflect on what can
be categorized into various subgenres of folk music that came
before punk. In the June 29, 2009, entry in Nara Voice, Nara
translates Streets of London,31
a 1969 song written by Ralph
McTell, an important British folk singer-songwriter (fig. 18):
So how can you tell me youre lonely
And say for you that the sun dont shine?
Figure 18
Let me take you by the hand and
Yoshitomo Nara
Lead you through the streets of London
Untitled (Lonely), 2008
Acrylic on wood panel Show you something
H. 91 x W. 193 x D. 5 in.
To make you change your mind
(231.1 x 490.2 x 12.7 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe,
Los Angeles
There have been numerous reports of social ills and how todays
younger generation is affected by disillusionment and nihilism.
It may be a sign of quiet social disorder and distortion caused
by the disintegration of family ties and diminishing connections
to the world outside the small enclosure of ones private space
that has led to the loss of community. If the above song is any
indication, Nara is hearing the echo of these lyrics in todays
society, which appears disinterested in its constituents. In
the current socio-cultural and political climate, it might
sound naive to imagine the possibility of a safe haven, not as
a grandiose utopia built on a national ideology but one that
comes in a more human scale, where personal effects, things
given by your beloved, and fragmentary memories of happy moments
from your childhood are all kept safe. At least, Nara is still
fighting to save these trifling, but precious, things and in
doing so has built quite a large following of genuine fans. In
keeping with the spirit of the original punks, we may all join
the cultural insurgency of DiY (fig. 19).
W hen I wake up in the morning, m y faith in love
remains. From Nobodys Fool, by Dan Penn
music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 105
moved

Notes
I would li ke to tha n k Dr. Rei ko Tomii a nd Dr. Ad ria n Favell for readi n g the
early d raft of this tex t. I a m particularly grateful for Rei kos feedback
on the art historical contex t of post-1945 Japa nese art, a nd for Ad ria ns
i n sights i nto pu n k a nd post-pu n k music trends as well as his com ments on
Japa nese Neo Pop artists.
Th roughout these citation s, u nless other wise noted, entries from the
artists blog, Nara Voice, ca n be fou nd by addi n g the nu mber listed after the
date of the blog entry to the followi n g U RL: http://harappa-h.org/modules/
xeblog/i ndex.php?action _ xeblog _details=1&blog _id=
1. 
T he q uotation at the begi n ni n g of this chapter comes from Yoshitomo Nara,
Early Works, Bijutsu techo 790 (July 2000): 79. All tra n slation s from
Japa nese to En glish are by the author u nless other wise noted.
2. 
Kenjiro Hosaka and Reiko Nakamura, eds., A Perspective on Contemporary Art 6:
Emotional Drawing (Tokyo: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2008), 14.
3. 
Rokabiri gaka [Rockabilly Painter], Shukan Sankei, April 27, 1958, reproduced
in Ushio Shinohara, Zenei no michi [The Way of Avant-garde] (Tokyo: Bijutsu
Shuppansha), 3133. The reference is also available (in Japanese only) at
http://www.new-york-art.com/zen-ei-dai-05.htm.
4. 
Yoshitomo Nara, Chiisana hoshi tsushin [The Little Star Dweller] (Tok yo:
Rocki nOn, 2004), 1517; Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen)
G.H.I. [My record collection (pre-pu n k) G.H.I.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara
Voice, April 17, 2009, 107 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara:
Tr ue Story, compiled by Yayoi Koji ma, Bijutsu techo 790 (July 2000): 90.
For more details about his early years, see a n i nter view with the artist
by Melissa Chiu in this publication. Jon Savage, Englands Dreaming:
Anarch y, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, revised edition (New York:
St. Marti ns/Griffi n, 2002).
5. 
Yoshitomo Nara: Tr ue Story, 9091. Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo ja ketto no
ha nashi [On record jackets], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, November 5,
2008, 75 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara, 5-gatsu 2-ka [May
2], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice posti n g about the passi n g of Kiyoshiro
Imawa no, May 6, 2009, 117 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010); a nd Nagoya e [To
Nagoya], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice posti n g about Yo La Ten go, December
20, 2009, 221 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010).
6. 
Takashi Azumaya, Yoshitomo Nara: His Gothic Innocent World, in Yoshitomo
Nara: From the Depth of My Drawer, ed. Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul:
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, 2005), 50.
7. 
A lbu ms with Naras cover art include Happy Hour by Shonen Knife (1998);
Pyromaniac (1999), Kitty Missiles (1999), and Trigger (2000) by The Star
Club; Pretend Hits (2001) by The Busy Signals; Ill Take the Rain (2001)
by R.E.M.; Splay (2002) and Houseplant (2009) by AlasNoAxis; Kimi Ga Suki
Raifu (2003) by Matthew Sweet; Suspended Animation (2005) by Fantmas;
Banging the Drum (2005) and Guitarist o korosanaide (2007) by Bloodthirsty
Butchers; Bloodthirsty Butchers vs +/ (2005) by Bloodthirsty Butchers /
+/; Cloudy, Later Fine (2005) by Tiki Tiki Bamboooos; Out (2006) by Day
& Taxi; Wasurenagusa (2007) by Ta ka ko Tate; There is Nothing (2007) by
Absy nthe Minded; Punk in a Coma (2009) by Momokomotion; Ramones Not Dead!
(2002), a tribute albu m to the Ramones by various artists; and Je suis comme
je suis (2004), a tribute albu m to Jacq ues Prvert by various artists.
8. 
I n discussi n g this lack of sy mbolic ex pression s, art critic Noi Sawaragi
poi nts out the si milarity between Naras work a nd the works by such ma n ga
artists as Kyoko Okaza ki. See Noi Sawaragi, Na n no maebu re mo na k u, potto
dento ga tsu k u yoni [All of a Sudden, Just Li ke Light Suddenly Comes On],
Bijutsu techo 790 (July 2000): 5861.
9. 
Sekai no mado o hira k u h yogen: Nara Yoshitomo X Yoshi moto Ta kaa ki tettei
togi [E x pr ession s th at O pen a Wi n dow to the World: Yosh itomo Na ra X
Ta kaa ki Yoshi moto In-depth Discussion], Eureka (October 2001): 182.
10. 
Jon ath a n Gra y, Cor nel Sa n dvoss, a n d C. L ee Ha r ri n g ton, Introduction:
Figure 19
W h y St ud y Fa n s? i n Fando m: Identities and Co m munities in a Mediated
Yoshitomo Nara
World, ed s. Jon ath a n Gra y, Cor nel Sa n dvoss, a n d C. L ee Ha r ri n g ton (New
1. 2. 3. 4. Change the History, 2007
York; Lon don: New York Un iversity P r ess, 2007), 10. The appeal of th i s
Billboard painting, acrylic on wood
h ybrid puzzle or ga me-li ke q uality of Naras work could also be studied i n
H. 74 38 x W. 55 15 x D. 3 18 in.
relation to the artists i nterest i n poetry a nd its associative capacity,
(189 x 141 x 8 cm)
Private collection, courtesy CAC Mlaga particularly in the usage of simile and metaphor. For this approach,

106 miwako tezuka music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 107
 Ta kaa ki Yoshimotos interview with Nara is insightful. See Sekai no mado
o hira k u hyogen, 16883.
11. 
Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, originally written in 1939
for Partisan Review, reprinted in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1961), 321. Greenberg itemizes samples of kitsch as popular,
commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers,
illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap
dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc. and surmises that [k]itsch is the
epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times as opposed to pure
aesthetics and forms studied by avant-garde artists.
12. 
Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) C.D. [My record collection
(pre-pu n k) C.D.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, April 13, 2009, 101
(accessed December 29, 2009).
13. 
Yoshitomo Nara, New Mor ni n g 2010, Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, Ja nuary
2, 2010, http://harappa-h.org/modules/xeblog/?action _ xeblog _i ndex=1&cat_
id=4. (This is the U RL of the most cu rrent blog posti n g at the ti me of
w riti n g, a nd accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010.)
14. 
Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) A.B. [My record collection
(pre-pu n k) A.B.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, April 10, 2009, 99
(accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k
izen) C.D. [My record collection (pre-pu n k) C.D.], Harappa Tsu-shi n:
Nara Voice, April 13, 2009, 101 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo
Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) E.F. [My record collection (pre-
pu n k) E.F.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, April 15, 2009, 104 (accessed
Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen)
G.H.I. [My record collection (pre-pu n k) G.H.I.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara
Voice, April 17, 2009, 107 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara,
Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) J. [My record collection (pre-pu n k) J.],
Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, April 18, 2009, 109 (accessed Ja nuary 13,
2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) K.L. [My record
collection (pre-pu n k) K.L.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, April 25, 2009,
112 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k
izen) M.N.O. [My record collection (pre-pu n k) M.N.O.], Harappa Tsu-shi n:
Nara Voice, April 29, 2009, 114 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo
Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) P.Q. [My record collection (pre-
pu n k) P.Q.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, May 6, 2009, 118 (accessed
Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) R. [My
record collection (pre-pu n k) R.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, May 9,
2009, 121 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon
(Pu n k izen) S. [My record collection (pre-pu n k) S.], Harappa Tsu-shi n:
Nara Voice, May 12, 2009, 123 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara,
Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) T. [My record collection (pre-pu n k) T.],
Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, May 22, 2009, 125 (accessed Ja nuary 13,
2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo korek ushon (Pu n k izen) U.V.W.X.Y.Z. [My
record collection (pre-pu n k) U.V.W.X.Y.Z.], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice,
May 23, 2009, 126 (accessed Ja nuary 13, 2010). Yoshitomo Nara, Rekodo
korek ushon VA ttenoga atta... [My record collection, I fou nd the stu ff
u nder VA...], Harappa Tsu-shi n: Nara Voice, May 24, 2009, 127 (accessed
Ja nuary 13, 2010).
15. 
Dan Graham, Punk as Propaganda, in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects,
19651990, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 9699.
16. 
Yoshita ka Mori, Hajimete no DiY: nandemo okane de kaeru to omouna yo!
[Introduction to DiY: Dont Thi n k Every thi n g Ca n Be Bought By Money!]
(Tok yo: Blues Interaction s, 2008), 4050; Yoshita ka Mori, Sutorito no
shiso: tenkan-ki to shite no 1990-nendai [Ideology of the Street: The
1990s as a Tu r ni n g Poi nt] (Tok yo: NHK Books, 2009), 6465.
17. 
T he theory of Micropop put forth by art critic Midori Matsui has much
releva ncy i n con sideri n g the rebellious natu re of Naras work. Matsui
has i nter preted the i mages of adolescent i magi nation s a nd obsession s
proliferati n g i n contemporary Japa nese art to have a n ex plosive power
vis--vis ca nonical a nd matu re moder nism, a nd her ter m Micropop
identifies artists whose work ex hibits such a seemi n gly self-absorbed
yet radical ma n ner of rebellion. Her critical a nalysis draws on various
philosophical discussion s presented by Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari,
Michel de Certeau, a nd Julia Kristeva about the cultu ral creativity of
mi noritiesthose who are at a secondary political, social, cultu ral, a nd/
or economical strata withi n a certai n predomi na nt system; for i n sta nce,
108 miwako tezuka
diasporic subjects a nd con su mers (as opposed to producers). In her theory,
Matsui position s Nara as a key artist who dari n gly retu r ned to fig u rative
pai nti n gs i n the 1990s while they were still margi nalized withi n the
contex t of moder nist art. See Midori Matsui, New Openi n gs i n Japa nese
Pai nti n g: Th ree Faces of Mi nor-ity, i n Painting at the Edge of the World,
ed. Douglas Fogle (New York: D.A.P., 2001), 4677; Midori Matsui, The Age
of Micropop: The New Generation of Japanese Artists (Tok yo: Parco Co.,
2007), 2837. See also her fu rther a nalysis of the art of Nara i n relation
to the contex t of Japa nese subcultu re i n this publication.
18. T omoko Na kagome, Getto za g u rori: gekido no pa n k u-shi Ni hon hen [Get

the Glory: The Tu rbulent History of Pu n k, Version Japa n], Rolling Stone
Japan 3, no. 28 (July 2009): 51. Mori, Sutorito no shiso, 169249.
19. Sekai no mado o hira k u h yogen, 171.

20. Yoshitomo Nara, Ron g u i ntaby u: Nara Yoshitomo, tabi no tochu de [A Lon g

Inter view: Yoshitomo Nara, i n the Middle of His Jou r ney], Bijutsu techo
52, no. 790 (July 2000): 42.
21. M ori, Hajimete no DiY, 4648. Ibid., 47.

22. T he title is ta ken from a son g on Morrisseys solo albu m Viva Hate from

1988. Between Yokoha ma a nd Hirosa ki, the ex hibition traveled to Ashiya
City Museu m of A rt a nd History, Hyogo prefectu re; Hiroshi ma City Museu m
of Contemporary A rt, Hiroshi ma prefectu re; a nd Hok kaido Asa hi kawa Museu m
of A rt, Hok kaido.
23. K ai Itoi, Japa ns Year of Nara ka mi, artnet.com (October 2001), http://w w w.

artnet.com/magazi ne/featu res/itoi/itoi10-22-01.asp (accessed November 11,
2009).
24. Yoshitomo Nara Exhibition Hirosaki Committee, ed., Yoshitomo NARA: From the

Depth of My Drawer, Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki (Hirosaki, 2005), n.p.
25.
In formation about the Ex hibition from Yoshii Brick Brewhouses ex hibition
archive web page as lin ked to the website of NPO Harappa: http://harappa-h.
org/narahiro_2003/en/you ko.htm (accessed January 13, 2010).
26. 
Cross Tal k: Ju n Aoki, Yoshitomo Nara, Hideki Toyoshi ma i n A to Z:
Yoshitomo Nara + g raf (Tok yo: Foil, 2006), n.p. See also Toyoshi mas essay
on the collaboration between Nara a nd g raf i n this publication.
27. 
W riti n g for ArtForum at the ti me of the A to Z ex hibition, Midori
Matsui noted that Naras work has become a contemporary eq uivalent of
fol k art, representi n g a nd con soli n g even people who other wise feel
alienated from moder n art. Matsuis report was, however, critical of the
ex hibition itself as it ulti mately ex posed the a mbig uous relation between
democratic open ness a nd regressive populism. See Midori Matsui, A
to Z: Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, ArtForum (December 2006), (accessible at
http://fi ndarticles.com/p/articles/mi_ m0268/is_4_45/ai_ n21130337/).
28. 
N ara, Ron g u i ntaby u, 44, 46.
29. 
R oy Lichten stei ns com ment from 1963, as q uoted i n Gra ha m, Pu n k as
Propaga nda, 99.
30. 
Kenji Kajiya, Art Project and Japan: Examining the Architecture of Art,
in Hiroshima Art Project 2008 (Hiroshima: Hiroshima Art Project, 2009),
12935 (accessible at http://www.art.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp/~kajiya/kajiya2008.
artproject.e.pdf). See also Adrian Favell, Echigo-Tsumari: The Fram Kitagawa
Philosophy, ARTiT ArtBlogs adrians blog, July 24, 2009, 01:32, http://www.
art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/QXyh6VkHEgdvOMwJi9ce/ (accessed January 2, 2010).
31. 
E xcer pt from Streets of London, w ritten by Ralph McTell i n 1969 a nd
first released i n 1974 i n the United Ki n gdom, with Yoshitomo Naras
tra n slation as it appears i n Nara Voice Streets of London from Ju ne
29, 2009, 144.
music on my mind: the art and phenomenon of yoshitomo nara 109
 plates

MUSIC
Songs by the Ramones and other pun k bands that Nara first
heard in the late 1970s shook him to the core. Naras resolve
to live his life on his own terms and never let go of his
independence shaped his motto to never forget the beginners
spirit. At the root of this is the do-it-yourself spirit of
punk culture. Many works from Naras earliest to most recent
years contain direct references to his favorite musicians
and/or song lyricstestament to the fact that music has
always been playing in his studio, in his mind, and often
in his installation works. This element of music in his work
also offers us associative clues that can be personalized
according to our own memory of certain songs and bands. Those
who are new to the bands he cites may develop an interest
in them, while those who are more familiar with them will
experience their perspective broadening into new horizons
through Naras works.
previous page
Untitled (1, 2, 3, 4!), 2008
Colored pencil on paper
H. 16 x W. 12 in. (40.6 x 30.5 cm)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew N. Dodge

opposite page
Drawing Board 2, 1986
Colored pencil and pen on paper
H. 23 58 x W. 31 12 in. (60 x 80 cm)
Collection of the artist

112 113
this page, left
Barclys, 1991
Colored pencil and ink on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 4 78 in. (20.5 x 12.4 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1915

Merry Christmas!, 19922000

this page, right
Savoy, 1991
Colored pencil and ink on paper
H. 8 116 x W. 4 78 in. (20.5 x 12.4 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1924
Ballpoint pen and colored pencil on
notebook paper
H. 8 34 x W. 10 58 in. (22.2 x 27 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

114 115
 this page, top
One Ear and...
, 19922000
Pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper
H. 5 x W. 9 in. (12.7 x 22.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

this page, bottom

Guitar Wolf, 19922000
Crayon, pen, and ink on graph paper
H. 6 14 x W. 5 78 in. (15.9 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top left

Untitled (Yellow Fish), 19922000
Colored pencil and felt-tip pen on paper
H. 7 x W. 8 14 in. (17.8 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top right

Hey Hey We Are Chinkees!!, 19922000
Colored pencil on postcard
H. 5 12 x W. 3 3
4 in. (14 x 9.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom left

Take Me to the Place, 19922000
Felt-tip pen on paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 78 in. (21 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom right

Come on! Comon!, 19922000
Felt-tip pen on graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 78 in. (21 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

116 117
this page, top
Love Youve Gotta Love Something,
19922000
Pencil on printed paper
H. 4 18 x W. 8 14 in. (10.5 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

this page, bottom

Stargirl, 19922000
Felt-tip pen, colored pencil, and
pencil on graph paper
H. 11 58 x W. 8 14 in. (29.5 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top left

Papa Papa Papa, 19922000
Ballpoint pen and colored pencil on
printed paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 78 in. (21 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top right

Guston Girls Smoke too Much, 19922000
Felt-tip pen and colored pencil on
notebook paper
H. 6 x W. 4 12 in. (15.2 x 11.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom left

Wanna Be Beethoven, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on
notebook paper
H. 6 x W. 4 38 in. (15.2 x 11.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom right

Hell Kitty Pupp Kin, 19922000
Pencil, colored pencil, watercolor, and
gouache on graph paper
H. 5 78 x W. 8 14 in. (14.9 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

118 119
White Riot, 1995
Acrylic on cotton
H. 39 38 x W. 47 14 in. (100 x 120 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 2597

120
this page
Cover for Yukios Band, 1995
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1922

opposite page
So You Better Hold On, 1996
Acrylic on canvas
H. 47 14 x W. 63 in. (120 x 160 cm)
Collection of Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy

122 123
this page
Cmon! Cmon!, 1996
Colored pencil and marker on paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 34 in. (21 x 14.7 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1939

opposite page
Its Better to Burn Out, 1996
Acrylic on canvas
H. 21 13 x W. 15 34 in. (54.1 x 40 cm)
Private collection

124
this page, left
Stand By Me, 1997
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1956
this page, right
Stand By Me, 1997
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1945
126
this page, left
Underground Clich, 1997
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1968
this page, right
Play It Loud!, 1997
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1950
127
Guitar Girl, 1997 Breathing in Then I Remember, 1997
Acrylic on cotton Colored pencil on paper
H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. (120 x 110 cm) H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Private collection Aomori Museum of Art, 1956

128 129
Amuro Girl, 1997
Fiberglass, wood, resin, and lacquer
H. 22 78 x W. 20 12 x D. 13 38 in.
(58 x 52 x 34 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1843
130
Puffy Girl, 1997
Fiberglass, wood, resin, and lacquer
H. 20 x W. 18 12 x D. 10 in.
(50.8 x 47 x 25.4 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1844
131
this page, top this page, top
U-ki-yo-e, 1999 U-ki-yo-e, 1999
Oil on book page Oil on book page
H. 13 x W. 16 58 in. (33 x 42.2 cm) H. 16 58 x W. 13 in. (42.4 x 33 cm)
Collection of Eileen Harris Norton Collection of Eileen Harris Norton

this page, bottom this page, bottom

U-ki-yo-e, 1999 Untitled (Nobodys Fool), 1998
Oil on book page Watercolor on paper
H. 16 58 x W. 13 in. (42.4 x 33 cm) H. 13 34 x W. 10 18 in. (34.9 x 25.7 cm)
Collection of Eileen Harris Norton Collection of Peter Norton

132 133
this page, left
Screen Memory, 19922000
Felt-tip pen on postcard
H. 5 78 x W. 4 18 in. (14.9 x 10.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
this page, right
Untitled (Drumming bunnies), 19922000
Felt-tip pen and colored pencil on
notebook paper
H. 10 18 x W. 8 18 in. (27 x 20.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
134
this page, top
Happy Hour Shonen Knife, 19922000
Colored pencil and pencil on paper
H. 4 34 x W. 4 34 in. (12.1 x 12.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
this page, bottom
Untitled (Pup with guitar), 19922000
Ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and
gouache on notebook paper
H. 6 12 x W. 6 in. (16.5 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
135
 this page, top
Over the Rainbow, 19922000
Colored pencil and ballpoint pen on
graph paper
H. 4 12 x W. 5 14 in. (11.4 x 13.3 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

this page, bottom left

Mike Ness Social Distortion, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on
notebook paper
H. 5 12 x W. 4 in. (14 x 10.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

this page, bottom right

Untitled (Annika Strm invite), 19922000
Felt-tip pen on printed paper
H. 6 x W. 4 12 in. (15.2 x 11.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

Hey Hey My My Rockn Roll Never Die!,

19922000
Colored pencil and pencil on
printed paper
H. 8 34 x W. 8 14 in. (22.2 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

136 137
 this page
Hellcat, 2000
Acrylic and oil on canvas
H. 20 x W. 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Collection of Elizabeth Blair and Michael Kelter

opposite page
Winter Long, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
H. 47 14 x W. 43 14 in. (120 x 110 cm)
Collection of Ms. Wang Wei

138 139
Dengeki Bop, 2000
Acrylic on paper
Each, H. 11 34 x W. 11 34 in. (30 x 30 cm)
Collection of Hiromichi Nakano

140 141
Little Ramona, 2001
Acrylic on cotton mounted on
fiber reinforced plastics
Diam. 70 34 in. (180 cm);
D. 10 12 in. (26.7 cm)
Rubell Family Collection, Miami

142 143
Light My Fire, 2001
Acrylic, fabric, and wood
H. 74 x W. 29 x D. 43 in. (186.7 x 67 x 113 cm)
Private collection

144
 size changed - larger

this page, left this page, top

Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies), Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002 20012002
Colored pencil and graphite on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 9 14 x W. 4 34 in. (23.5 x 12.1 cm) H. 7 12 x W. 8 12 in. (19.1 x 21.6 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York New York

this page, right this page, bottom

Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies), Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002 20012002
Colored pencil and graphite on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 9 x W. 4 in. (22.9 x 10.2 cm) H. 11 34 x W. 8 14 in. (29.9 x 21 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York New York

146 147
this page, top this page, top
Marshall, 2003 Blitz Krieg Bop, 2003
Colored pencil on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 8 14 x W. 11 1116 in. (21 x 29.7 cm) H. 4 1116 x W. 9 18 in. (11.9 x 23.1 cm)
Private collection Collection of the artist

this page, bottom this page, bottom

Radio Radio, 2003 Rusty Guitar, 2003
Colored pencil on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 9 78 x W. 13 1116 in. (25 x 34.8 cm) H. 9 14 x W. 4 1116 in. (23.5 x 11.9 cm)
Private collection Collection of Emiko Shimizu

148 149
 hi-res replaced

Nobodys Fool, 2003 Untitled (Nobodys Fool), 2005

Colored pencil on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 17 18 x W. 12 in. (43.5 x 30.5 cm) H. 26 34 x W. 9 716 in. (68 x 24 cm)
Private collection Galerie Zin k Mnchen, Berlin

150 151
Banging the Drum, 2007
Billboard painting, acrylic on wood
H. 120 38 x W. 120 38 x D. 2 34 in.
(260 x 260 x 7 cm)
Private collection, courtesy CAC Mlaga

153
Untitled (Lets Rock), 2008
Colored pencil on paper
H. 16 34 x W. 11 34 in. (42.6 x 29.9 cm)
Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

154
 hi-res replaced

this page opposite page

Untitled (1, 2, 3, 4 Man), 2008 Untitled (Green Rocker), 2008
Colored pencil on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 14 12 x W. 9 in. (36.8 x 22.9 cm) H. 13 x W. 9 in. (33 x 22.9 cm)
Collection of Erica Gervais Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

156 157
this page
Untitled (Cheers for You!), 2008
Colored pencil on paper
H. 12 x W. 9 in.
(30.5 x 22.9 cm)
Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
opposite page
Untitled (Girl with Guitar), 2008
Acrylic on wood panel
H. 91 x W. 73 12 x D. 5 in.
(231.1 x 186.7 x 12.7 cm)
Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

158 159
Untitled (Kill Kill Kill the P), 2008 Untitled (Hey! Ho! Lets Go!), 2008
Colored pencil on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 13 34 x W. 11 12 in. (34.9 x 29.2 cm) H. 17 12 x W. 13 14 in. (44.5 x 33.7 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

160 161
Untitled (Luck), 2008
Pencil on paper
H. 30 38 x W. 24 38 in. (77.2 x 61.9 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

162
this page, left this page, right this page, left this page, right
Love or Affection, 2009 Nobodys Fool, 2009 Born to Lose, 2009 You and Me, 2009
Ceramic Ceramic Ceramic Ceramic
H. 19 1116 x Diam. 11 1316 in. (50 x 30 cm) H. 17 1116 x Diam. 13 38 in. (45 x 34 cm) H. 16 1516 x Diam. 10 14 in. (43 x 26 cm) H. 21 14 x Diam. 13 in. (54 x 33 cm)
Collection of the artist Collection of the artist Collection of the artist Collection of the artist

164 165
this page opposite page
Green Girl, 2008 Sandy, 2008
Acrylic on canvas Acrylic on canvas
H. 31 34 x W. 27 in. (80.6 x 68.6 cm) H. 36 14 x W. 31 12 in. (92.1 x 80 cm)
Private collection Collection of Adam and Iris Singer, Paradise Valley, AZ

166 167
M.J., 2000
Acrylic on canvas
H. 32 x W. 25 12 in. (81.3 x 64.8 cm)
Collection of Elizabeth Blair and Michael Kelter

168

Figure 20
Yoshitomo Nara
The Little Star Dweller, 2006
Acrylic and glitter on canvas
H. 90 x W. 72 in. (228.6 x 182.9 cm)
Private collection, New York
170 melissa chiu
A Conversation with the Artist
Melissa Chiu
Melissa Chiu: Nara-san, my first question relates to your
life growing up.1 So many of the images in your paintings
and drawings relate to childhood, so I am curious about this
period in your life. I know that you grew up in Aomori, which
you said before was a rather remote place in Japan. Can you
describe your childhood?
Yoshitomo Nara: In the past when people asked me about my
backgrou nd, I answered what I thought they wanted to hear
from me. But recently, I a m sta rti n g to feel that these
kinds of things are very private and maybe I should not be
telling people about my personal memories. I dont know why
Im starting to feel this way, but since Ive been asked now,
Ill try to answer. Sometimes I wonder if what I recall as my
memories are actual memories from my childhood, or if I am
making something up [unknowingly] to fit my work.
In truth, up until elementary school, I didnt know how
people in other countries or other parts of Japan lived or
played. My world, that is, my physical world, was very small.
But this kind of limitation is probably common among all
children. Its definitely strange if a child has a grasp of
the whole world, so the physical environment is very limited
to all children. In terms of a world of imagination, its
also common, I think, that all children have it. So, when I
think in this way, I feel whether you are from a northern or
southern region might not be so related to your psychological
development. More closely related to this, I think, is your
family environment or the type of family in which you were
brought up.
My generation in Japan came at the cusp of a shift in
family structure, from a large family to a nuclear family.
The large family consists of grandparents, parents, and their
children. In popular Japanese anime you can find examples of
this kind of familyin Sazae-san or Chibimaruko-chan. When
the family structure changed to a nuclear family, you could
also find it in anime like Crayon Shin-chan.2
My generation
171
 Figure 21 Figure 22
Yoshitomo Nara Yoshitomo Nara
N.Y. (Self-portrait), 2002 Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
5-color etching and aquatint; 20012002
edition of 35 Colored pencil and graphite on paper
Sheet, H. 19 14 x W. 14 1516 in. H. 4 14 x W. 10 in. (10.8 x 25.4 cm)
(48.9 x 37.9 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,

Collection of Lyor Cohen New York

quite twisted, but I was a rebellious, adult-like child.

The time when I was depicting children in a lot of my work
was probably a period when I was trying to regain something
childlike. Well, I still do depict children, but the images
that people generally associate with me are from that time
when I was trying to take back my childhood.

MC: I wonder if we might move a little bit forward and talk

about the beginning of your life as an artist. You had art
training in Japan, but also in Germany. Can you tell us why
you decided to pursue art? Was there a particular moment or
reason that drew you to create art? Were you drawn to it as
a child?

YN: Probably. I still dont consider myself an artist. I didnt

learn painting with the intention to become an artist. After
I graduated from high school, I actually wanted to study
literature. I was dreaming of becoming something like a poet,
novelist, or journalist, so I wanted to enter a university
with a strong program in liberal arts. During my senior year
in high school, I began taking a course at a prep school.
I found it really boring, so I spent my time outside the
grew up in this transitional period, although I thin k that classroom. At this prep school, there was also an art course
the family started to become divided in the beginning of for students who were interested in going to art school. One
the 1950s. student mistook me for a student of that course, and he offered
to sell me a ticket for a nude croquis [sketching] class. For a
MC: Youve said that your own transition into adulthood was high school student, that was tempting, and also I remembered
very quick. Its of interest to me that a lot of the figures that I was actually good at drawing. So I bought the ticket
i n you r work a re child ren. Ca n you ex plai n wh y you a re and a sketchbook, and I attended the class. After I tried my
interested in this pre-adulthood period? hand at drawing, the instructor called me into a meeting to
discuss which art schools I should apply to. I told him that I
YN: I think I was a very adult-like child. My essays from actually was not taking the art preparation course. He said,
first grade were written in a direct style, not in a style Why dont you take the art course. You have a talent. For
that children usually use. They are really strange even to the first time then, I thought, Hmm, do I really have such
me, because they sound like an adult writing. But, I remember a talent? Many years after this, I myself actually worked
when I turned about eight years old, I was then consciously as an art instructor at a prep school, so now I can tell you
trying to write like a child. Thin king about it now, its that all instructors say that to all students so they take

172 melissa chiu a conversation with the artist 173

larger and moved smaller and moved

Figure 23 little. I dont dislike manga, but Im not interested in

Yoshitomo Nara
it, and I dont watch anime at all. Probably, my childhood
1987 in Nagoya, 1997
Colored pencil on paper visual experiences were from ehon (picture books), manga, and
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. television, but I cant imagine having any direct influence
(29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1961
from the method or technique of manga and anime. Picture
books tell many stories with one picture, so this kind of
system, narratives emerging from a single picture, has had
a much stronger influence on my work, particularly my early
work, I think.
One thing Id like to say is that even with those
paintings that have been described as manga-like, I realized
them only after much time, work, and struggle. Looking at
recent artists, I find that many of them rush into making
sophisticated works. Now, are such works real? I listened
to many things, including punk, and tried many things, and
thats how I arrived at this point now.

MC: Can you be more specific about the kinds of storybooks

that you have found to be influential?

YN: Any of the storybooks that everyone readsin the West,

Figure 24
Yoshitomo Nara
Little Red Riding Hood, 19922000
Pencil on envelope
H. 8 34 x W. 4 12 in. (22.2 x 11.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
stories like Aesops Fables, Hans Christian Andersens fairy
tales, or the American classics like The Little House by
Virginia Lee Burton. I liked the pictures in German childrens
books. I remember images of childrens faces with flowers
around them. Of the American picture books, my favorite was
The Little House. I think everybody knows this storybook. Of
course, I also read many Japanese childrens books.
MC: Many childrens books are actually quite grim, and sometimes
even very violent. Do you think you draw upon that?

YN: I just read them; if there were one hundred books, then
I read those, and if there were only ten, then I read ten. I
never asked for more, and never read into them.

their courses. I didnt think of it as a big deal to enter an MC: Now I would like to slightly change the subject of our
art school. I just thought, A person like me can go to an art conversation toward your process of making art. In Asia
school? My preconceived image of art school was that it was Societys exhibition, there are many drawings and paintings,
a place only geniuses could go to. But I casually started to as well as sculptures and installations. To look at the
think that if I could take an entrance examination to an art relation ship between pai nti n gs a nd d rawi n gs from the
school, maybe I should try. perspective of a lot of artists, they consider drawings to
be preliminary sketches in preparation for a final product.
MC: So much of what has been written on your work cites the How do you as an artist approach the relationship between
in fluence of manga and anime. Today how do you see that painting and drawing? I know you draw most days, and many of
influence? your drawings are in public collections, so I wanted to ask
you about your thoughts on this.
YN: I think everyone misunderstands the influence of manga
and anime on my work. Honestly, I have been more influenced YN: I mentioned before that I dont consider myself an artist,
by childrens books, especially ones that I read when I was so its the people who on their ow n will purchase my work

174 melissa chiu a conversation with the artist 175

for their collections. I cant give an exact and professional Figure 25
Yoshitomo Nara
answer to your questions. I feel I am operating somewhere
The Last Match, 1996
beyond that kind of issue. If I analyze the relationship Acrylic on cotton
between drawing or sketches and painting, my work becomes too H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. (120 x 110 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1840
pedantic. In reality, I just dont like studying, so I think
Im able to create because I dont think about something like
a strategy. To me, to verbally explain my work makes me feel
as though it lessens my integrity. I would like to avoid that
as much as possible.

MC: If there is one particular criticism of your work that

you hear over and over again, and you think it is completely
wrong, what would it be?

YN: Well, it makes me feel a bit awkward to say this, but I

dont think biographical and psychological analyses would
lead to accurate criticism, because ones mental frame changes
from time to time. If there was an accurate criticism of
painting, it would have to be developed based on disciplines
such as color theory and structural theory, that is, analytical
perspectives that can be applied to anything. I studied
topology in high school, and I feel that my way of seeing
things is very topological.3 Lets say two people make clay
sculptures of a teapot. One person makes it to look like a
real teapot from the outside, but in reality, it is just a mass
of clay. Another person makes an ugly teapot but with all the
functional characteristics of a teapot; it is hollow inside,
and comes with a lid, and a spout that could pour out water.
From a topological point of view, the ugly teapot is a teapot,
but the realistic-looking teapot is not a teapot. People tend
to look at things only at face value and would categorize the ultimately, it is myself alone; one person who can communicate
fake teapot together with the real teapot when they should be with me without words. I basically have no illusionary idealism
looking at the ugly teapot. of universal human understanding. Communication is born out
of a lack of understanding.
MC: You have described a philosophical view. How would you
connect this idea to your work? MC: You do, however, have something of a cult following, especially
with young women in Japan. Why do you think that is?
YN: That if you look only at the surface, my work will not
really reveal itself to you. Just as the fake teapot can be Y N: I th i n k its ju st you r preconceived i m a ge of me
...
categorized with the real teapot, there are many things that [laughter]
are categorized with the same label as my work, but in truth
many of them are completely different things. MC: How do you think they see you and your work?

MC: Taking that idea a little bit further, what you are
really saying is that there is a smaller group of people who
understand your work better than others. I wonder if you can
tell us more about that community who you see as connecting
with your work.
YN: The more I thin k about it, the closer it is to me, and
YN: I dont know. Ive never asked any of them. Maybe you
should interview them. Everybody looks at my work differently.
For instance, a person studying painting and a person with
no particular training in art would look at my work very
differently. I think the majority of my general audience
empathizes with my work. Audiences tend to look at specific
images, but in truth, there is little information in those

176 melissa chiu a conversation with the artist 177

moved
Figure 26ac
Installation by YNG at BALTIC
Centre for Contemporary Art,
Gateshead, United Kingdom, 2008
178 melissa chiu
images, so they insert their own selves into the images and
try to see something more in them. In this way, they see
something of their own reflection that is not really there.
They bury themselves deeper and deeper into them and become
fascinated by them. This is very similar to how we read
shishosetsu.4 We cant help but identify ourselves with the
protagonists of those novels. Looking at my work, many people
say, This is me!
MC: I wanted also to cover in this interview your collaboration
with the Japanese design collective graf. You first collaborated
in 2003. The collaboration has meant that your work is seen in
greater three-dimensional form. You are creating structures
through which to display your paintings and drawings that
encourage a different kind of viewing experience. It almost
feels like you have a presence in the exhibition. It feels
like you are in the studio and youve gone away for five
minutes, and you might be back at any moment. Can you talk
about the kind of expectation your installations set up for
the viewer?
YN: I want to trick the viewers.
MC: In what way?
YN: Rather than merely offering the work for the viewers to
see face-on, I want to trigger their imaginations. This way,
each individual can see my work with his or her own unique,
imaginative mind. People with very imaginative minds perhaps
can see something more than I can, and the reverse is true:
to those with no imagination, my work will appear just like
rubbish. I watch from behind the scenes, and it amuses me.
Maybe an exhibition is not where I present my achievement but
an experimental place where visitors find an opportunity to
see themselves reflected as though my work were a mirror or a
window. For people who cannot, or will not, really look, there
will be nothing.
MC: For the Asia Society exhibition, we are focusing on your
connection and interest in music. Can you talk a little bit
about how you connect to music?
YN: Music is basically sustained by fans who love certain
bands, buy their albu ms, and go to their concerts. So, a
concert hall is almost always filled with fans of the band
whos playing, and there is little chance there would be
someone who does not like that band. I find it interesting
that even a song by an extremely popular band who could fill
a large stadium could be completely ignored as trivial noise
by people who are not fans of that band. So, the popularity
a conversation with the artist 179
slightly larger

Figure 27 and so forth, but ever since I learned about the topological
Yoshitomo Nara
theory, whatever strategy the music industry comes up with
Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002 to advertise their works, it ma kes me feel that there is
Colored pencil on paper something wrong. Since I was a teenager, I have stumbled by
H. 11 34 x W. 8 14 in. (29.9 x 21 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
chance upon minor record labels in the United States, and I
New York
preferred music from those small labels to ones promoted by
the larger record companies. Throughout my junior high and
high school years, I looked for small labels and tried to find
really good music coming out of them that didnt make it on
the radio. But the sensibility of that kind of music actually
didnt fit my maturity at the time. It was music for mature
adults, and I was too young, so I couldnt connect with it
naturally. It was at that time when punk music came about. I
was eighteen. I really loved The Clash. Another band that I
liked at the time, which came slightly earlier than The Clash
and was based in New York, was Television with Tom Verlaine.

Figure 28
MC: How was punk received in Japan? I am just trying to get
Yoshitomo Nara
The Starclub, 19922000 a sense of whether there was a com munity of young people
Felt-tip pen on paper interested in the punk culture in Japan? Did you connect with
H. 7 18 x W. 5 in. (18.1 x 12.7 cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
other people who liked punk or were you on your own?
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

YN: There were two groups of punk fans in Japan at the time, I
think. One was those who were quick to learn and adopted it as
a fashionable new foreign import. Another group was those who
found themselves in a condition of loneliness, and shared the
feelings of the youth in London. They were the underside of
prosperous society, often from the countryside and subjected
to low-paying jobs in big cities. They were the underdogs in
solitude who sought for something to rebel against. They were
isolated because in Japan the economic situation was very
different from that in England, where punk youth actually
made statements through street demonstrations. Perhaps the
situation was not as serious in Japan, so nobody came together
to form group demonstrations, even as there were young people
of the band has nothing to do with whether or not its music being neglected. In Europe there is a tradition of social
reaches out to everyone universally. activism; you often see protesters with banners and so forth
organizing demonstrations. In Japan demonstrations ended up
MC: A lot of your work is related to pun k and rock music, more often than not as just trendy acts or juvenile rebellion
and more often than not, its this spirit of rebellion, often based on adolescent desire and frustration.
associated with early punk, that people relate to in your
work. If you agree with this, at what point in time did this MC: Its very clear that music has really been important
become important to you? to your life. How and to what extent is it con nected to or
influencing your work?
YN: I dont like the commercialism that drives speculative
investment. If a band is coming out with a new album, its YN: Im not sure if the works themselves show that connection,
producer might create a large poster or a billboard advertising but music certainly played a major role in the formation of
its release date. People are lured into buying that album merely me as an individual. The influence of music on me is far more
because of the influence of the advertisement. Of course, I significant than that of manga and other things that people
love rock music, so I admire the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, often talk about.

180 melissa chiu a conversation with the artist 181

MC: My final question to you is, whats on your playlist now?
YN: Beirut; its an American band. Others include Bright Eyes
and Neutral Milk Hotel. And some other older bands that you
probably have never heard of, like Ernie Graham from Belfast
in Northern Ireland, or Andwella. Andwella is from the United
Kingdom, I think, but they were heavily influenced by American
music from the 1970s; they wanted to be American, so they sang
with American accents, and wrote a song called Mississippi
Water when they actually have never been to Mississippi. I
really identify with this band. When I was in high school,
I was listening to American music when I had actually never
been to the United States. Recently, not much punk music is
in my playlist, but I do listen to it when Im cleaning up,
or when Im stretching canvases. My paintings have been going
through a change in recent years. Before, Id paint as far as
my physical stamina lasted and finished a work in a day. Then,
I would be blasting loud music. But now, I try to spend more
time contemplating my work, stepping back, facing my work,
and thinking. I think you can see this change in my recent
paintings. There is one more thing that people misunderstand
about me. I like music, not just punk music. If I only liked
punk, I think my work wouldve ended up superficial.
MC: Do you want to make any final comments?
YN: If I sleep on thin gs that Ive said today, tomorrow
I might say a completely opposite thing. W hat I mean is
that I dont have a full trust in language. Everybody has
afterthoughts, something like regretting a love letter that
they should have never sent. You thought you were expressing
your genuine emotion in the letter, but looking back, you feel
rather frustrated because there is still something that you
couldnt express. I am really not good with words, so when you
are reading this, Id be happy if you can think of this as
only less than one fourth of the things that I really wanted
to say.
MC: Thank you very much Nara-san.
New York, New York
March 5, 2009
182 melissa chiu
Notes
1. 
San is an honorific suffix in Japanese similar to Mr., Mrs., or Ms.
2. 
S azae-san is a long-running TV anime that began in 1969. It is based on
Machiko Hasegawas four-framed strip manga originally serialized in newspapers
from 1946 to 1974. It is a humorous everyday family drama that tells the
story of a large household where two generations of the Isono family live
under the same roof. The atmosphere is generally that of the 1970s, but newer
episodes reflect the times when they were created. Since it first came on air,
Sazae-san has been the most widely and regularly watched TV anime in Japan.
Chibimaruko-chan is a serialized TV anime originally aired from 1990 to 1992.
It was based loosely on an autobiographical manga of the same title by Momoko
Sakura, and depicts everyday suburban life in 1970s Japan. Comical and often
touching stories revolve around the main character, Momoko Sakura, nicknamed
Chibimaruko, and her family. The Sakura family, like the Isonos in Sazae-san,
is a two-generation household where Momoko, her parents, and her older sister
live with her grandparents. Crayon Shin-chan is a shtick manga serialized
in a young adult magazine from 1990 and made into a TV anime series in 2000.
The main character Shinnosuke Nohara (nicknamed Shin-chan) is a mischievous
kindergartener, and unlike the two previously mentioned anime families, the
Noharas consist only of Shin-chans parents and younger sister. By the 1990s,
this scaled-down family structure was considered to be representative of the
majority of Japanese families.
3. 
T opology is an area of mathematics that looks at spatial properties that
retain their essential characteristics through deformation without rupture or
transformation.
4. 
S hishosetsu is a genre of novel that is quasi-autobiographical or autobiographical
and is narrated in the first person; literally I-novel.
a conversation with the artist 183
 plates

REBELLION
The youthful spirit of rebellion is embodied both in Yoshitomo
Naras work and within himself. His written words are scrawled
across works on paper from the 1990s, directly expressing
the anger, frustration, and other sentiments that fuel one to
rise up against the challenges of life. Some phrases take on
slang: Spirits of Fuckin Street. Others serve more as an
inspirational call to his audience and to himself: Pave your
dreams! and Love, youve gotta love something. Drawing is
an extremely important medium for Nara, and he often reveals
an emerging idea in its raw state as a preparatory sketch.
But, more importantly, he uses drawing to create a personal
diary that he returns to constantly. Paintings, on the other
hand, depict a single figure of a little boy or girl, who
quietly yet firmly returns our gaze, like a reflection in a
mirror that stubbornly refuses to follow our every move.
this page
Untitled (Top of head), 19922000
Colored pencil on graph paper
H. 5 78 x W. 8 14 in. (14.9 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page
I Want the Motorcycle, 19922000
Felt-tip pen, colored pencil, and
pencil on paper
H. 11 58 x W. 8 12 in. (29.5 x 21.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

186 187
this page
Final Count, 1995
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1931

opposite page, top left

Untitled (Person squeezed between
Fucked Up), 19922000
Colored pencil and ballpoint pen on
notebook paper
H. 9 x W. 6 in. (22.9 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top right

Stuffed Dog, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on paper
H. 6 14 x W. 3 12 in. (15.9 x 8.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom left

Same as Always, 19922000
Crayon and ink on graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 6 in. (21 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom right

I Hate! Hey Hey Hey!, 19922000
Crayon, felt-tip pen, and pencil on
graph paper
H. 8 38 x W. 5 78 in. (21.3 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

188 189
this page
Harmless Kitty, 1994
Acrylic on cotton
H. 59 116 x W. 55 18 in. (150 x 140 cm)
Private collection

opposite page, top

Dead Flower, 1994
Acrylic on cotton
H. 39 38 x W. 39 38 in. (100 x 100 cm)
Private collection

opposite page, bottom

Pancake Kamikaze, 1996
Acrylic on cotton
H. 47 14 x W. 43 516 in. (120 x 110 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1841

190 191
Untitled, 1997 Untitled (Silent Violence), 1997
Colored pencil on paper Watercolor on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm) H. 9 x W. 6 in. (22.9 x 15.2 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1949 Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

192 193
 Hyper Enough (to the City), 1997
Acrylic on canvas
H. 49 x W. 59 in. (125 x 150 cm)
Rubell Family Collection, Miami

194 195

Untitled (Misc. drawings), 19922000
Pencil and felt-tip pen on paper
H. 8 14 x W. 10 in. (21 x 25.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
196
Im Very Happy with You!, 19922000
Pencil, colored pencil, and
felt-tip pen on paper
H. 8 14 x W. 11 34 in. (21 x 29.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund
197
Dead or Peace, 1997 Punch Me Harder, 1998
Colored pencil on paper Acrylic on paper
H. 11 1116 x W. 8 316 in. (29.7 x 20.8 cm) H. 32 1516 x W. 23 38 in. (83.7 x 59.4 cm)
Aomori Museum of Art, 1953 Private collection

198 199
 this page, top
How Did the Dog Get It?, 19922000
In k and colored pencil on graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 78 in. (21 x 14.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

this page, bottom

Pave Your Dreams. Make a Road!, 19922002
Colored pencil and ballpoint pen
on paper
H. 4 38 x W. 8 34 in. (11.1 x 22.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and

promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top left

Pave Your Dream!, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on
graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 34 in. (21 x 14.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, top right

Untitled (Yellow-haired girl), 19922000
Colored pencil and felt-tip pen
on paper
H. 11 34 x W. 8 in. (29.8 x 20.3 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page, bottom

Black Eye and Fat Lip, 19922000
Ballpoint pen, colored pencil,
pencil, felt-tip pen, and gouache
on graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 11 12 in. (21 x 29.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

200 201
 It Doesnt Matter if the New Millennium
Comes or Not, 19922000
Felt-tip pen and colored pencil on
printed paper
H. 6 12 x W. 7 34 in. (16.5 x 19.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

202 203
this page
Untitled (Dog with Japanese writing),
19922000
Felt-tip pen and colored pencil on
graph paper
H. 8 14 x W. 5 34 in. (21 x 14.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

opposite page
For the People, 19922000
Pencil and colored pencil on paper
H. 11 34 x W. 8 14 in. (29.8 x 21 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional and
promised gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund

204 205
 this page
No!, 2001
Acrylic on paper
H. 20 516 x W. 14 516 in. (51.6 x 36.4 cm)
Private collection

opposite page
Pup Nehru, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
H. 23 12 x W. 19 34 in. (59.7 x 50.2 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

206 207
Too Young to Die, 2001
Acrylic on cotton mounted on
fiber reinforced plastics
Diam. 70 34 in. (180 cm);
D. 10 12 in. (26.7 cm)
Rubell Family Collection, Miami

208 209
 this page, top
Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 34 x W. 8 14 in. (29.9 x 21 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

this page, bottom

Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002
Colored pencil on paper
H. 11 34 x W. 8 14 in. (29.9 x 21 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

opposite page
Untitled (Who Snatched the Babies),
20012002
Colored pencil and marker on paper
H. 11 34 x W. 8 14 in. (29.9 x 21 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery,
New York

210 211
this page, top
Walking Alone, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 14 36 x W. 14 916 in. (37.5 x 37 cm)
Private collection

this page, bottom

Untitled, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 4 516 x W. 8 58 in. (11 x 22 cm)
Private collection

opposite page, top left

Crap, 2003
Colored pencil and pencil on paper
H. 4 516 x W. 6 12 in. (11 x 16.5 cm)
Private collection

opposite page, top right

So What?, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 13 116 x W. 10 58 in. (33.2 x 27 cm)
Private collection

opposite page, bottom left

Western ist Einsam, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 13 18 x W. 10 58 in. (33.4 x 27 cm)
Private collection

opposite page, bottom right

Aus Dem Kriesen Gebiet, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 8 12 x W. 8 12 in. (21.5 x 21.5 cm)
Private collection

214 215
this page, top
Look at Yourself, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 10 18 x W. 10 12 in. (25.6 x 26.6 cm)
Galerie Zin k Mnchen, Berlin

this page, bottom

U Dork!, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 6 38 x W. 8 34 in. (16.1 x 22.3 cm)
Collection ofManuel Emch

opposite page, top

Solid Fist, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 9 716 x W. 13 916 in. (24 x 34.4 cm)
Galerie Zin k Mnchen, Berlin

opposite page, bottom

Fuckin Dog, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 4 34 x W. 9 716 in. (12 x 24 cm)
Collection of George and Linda Kurz, Cincinnati, Ohio

216 217
Untitled, 2004 Untitled, 2004
Colored pencil on paper Colored pencil on paper
H. 13 x W. 9 716 in. (33 x 24 cm) H. 4 58 x W. 9 14 in. (11.8 x 23.5 cm)
Private collection Galerie Zin k Mnchen, Berlin

218 219
 this page, top
Im a Son of a Gun, 2006
Colored pencil and in k on cardboard
H. 26 34 x W. 18 316 in. (68 x 46.2 cm)
Collection of the artist

this page, bottom

A Knocked Down Dragged Out Fight, 2006
Colored pencil and in k on cardboard
H. 15 34 x W. 20 12 in. (40 x 52 cm)
Collection of the artist

opposite page, top left

Thats Insulting!, 2006
Colored pencil on paper
H. 16 12 x W. 11 1116 in. (42 x 29.7 cm)
Private collection

opposite page, top right

Im Just Alright, 2006
Colored pencil on paper
H. 16 12 x W. 11 58 in. (42 x 29.6 cm)
Collection of Susumu Nakazawa

opposite page, bottom left

Child Survival, 2006
Colored pencil on paper
H. 16 12 x W. 11 1116 in. (42 x 29.7 cm)
Collection of Hiromichi Nakano

opposite page, bottom right

Fr immer Krank mchte ich sein, 2006
Colored pencil on paper
H. 16 12 x W. 11 1116 in. (42 x 29.7 cm)
Collection of the artist

220 221
this page, top
Promise Me No Dead End Streets, 2006
Colored pencil and ink on cardboard
H. 18 18 x W. 27 18 in. (46 x 69 cm)
Collection of the artist

this page, bottom

Untitled, 2006
Colored pencil on paper
H. 12 38 x W. 9 716 in. (31.5 x 24 cm)
Collection of Thierry Lamoine and Arrow Nakajima

opposite page
Never Die!, 2006
Acrylic and pencil on board
H. 46 18 x W. 46 18 in. (117 x 117 cm)
Collection of the artist

222 223
Sayon, 2006 No Hopeless, 2007
Acrylic on canvas Acrylic, paper, and tape on canvas
H. 57 12 x W. 44 14 in. (146 x 112.5 cm) H. 46 18 x W. 36 14 in. (117.2 x 92.1 cm)
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Collection of Elizabeth Blair and Michael Kelter

224 225
Angry Blue Boy, 2008
Acrylic on fragmented canvas
H. 78 x W. 76 in. (198.1 x 193 cm)
Collection of Elizabeth Blair and Michael Kelter

227
hi-res replaced / Please silo - no white border

Subject to Change:
Yoshitomo Nara and
American Culture

Michael Wilson

Yoshitomo Nara shares a birthdayDecember 5thwith Walt Disney.

A coincidence of course, but the confluence of events has an
uncanny resonance in the context of the Japanese artists
cross-disciplinary practice. The aesthetic connection between
the two figures is unambiguous: Nara is as indebted to the
master animator as is any contemporary artist working with
cartoon-like imagery (whether they care to acknowledge the
influence or not). But the painter, sculptor, and draftsman
has also expressed an admiration for Disney as a phenomenon,
recognizing his appeal to children and his unprecedented
global reach. Indeed, he has gone so far as to claim, I would
rather be someone like Disney than an artist (fig. 30). 1

In doing so, he pays self-deprecating homage to an appeal

that transcends discipline and genre, a popularity that is
wholly egalitarian and in that sensealbeit arguablyalso
distinctively American.
The conversation between Na ras work a nd A merica n
cultureboth mainstream and nicheis multifaceted and ongoing,
but Disney presents itself as a fitting name with which to
begin. It may not have been until after the Second World War
that American influence really made itself felt in Japan, but
once it did, there was no turning back. Nara, born on the
cusp of the 1960s, belonged to a generation distinguished by
a voracious appetite for the kinds of American imports that
were first introduced by GIs in 1945. And Disney, along with
Warner Bros. and Marvel, was among the first to be consumed
and digested.
Disney the visionary entrepreneur, who came up through
the ranks of cartoonists and commercial illustrators rather
than following an academic route to his eventual iconic status,
could be said to have his roots in something resembling a
Figure 29 folk tradition, at least insofar as he was not a member of
Yoshitomo Nara
Im Not Part of Your Elite, 2006
the professional art world as we understand it. In interviews,
Colored pencil on paper Nara himself only occasionally alludes to other fine artists
H. 16 12 x W. 11 58 in. (42 x 29.6 cm) as having been inspirational to his practice. Of equal and
Collection of Ildegarda and Alfred Scheidegger,
Switzerland probably greater value to him have been creative Americans

229

for whom gallery and museum exposure (if indeed it ever came)
was entirely incidental to their success. There are certainly
notable similarities between his oeuvre and those of not only
Disney but also Peanuts creator Charles Schultz and kitschy
big eye portraitist Margaret Keane (fig. 31).
Born in Tennessee in 1927, Keane first sold her work
u nder two na mes: works sig ned Kea ne were believed to
have been painted by her husband, Walter Keane, while works
signed MDH Keane were believed to have been painted by
her.2 She was in fact the painter of both. Keanes early
works depicted melancholic children in gloomy settings, but
after divorcing, moving to Hawaii, and becoming a Jehovahs
Witness, her paintings acquired a cheerier tone. Her imagery
has been a fixture in American popular culture for decades,
exercising a clearly discernible influence over the likes
of filmmaker Tim Burton and animator Craig McCracken, and
earning a mention in Woody Allens 1973 comedy, Sleeper, in
which the people of the future consider her to be one of
the greatest artists of all time. The latteraffectionately
mockingreference reveals Keane, like saccharine American
self-described painter of light, Thomas Kin kade, as an artist
almost completely beyond the pale of critical acceptance but
distinguished nonetheless by enormous popular success. Her
curiously distorted figures are transparently sentimental
(and in most senses highly conser vative), but retain a
creepiness that marks them out as kin to Naras.
Of course, Nara is hardly the first exhibiting artist
to have been touched by such visions. The landscape of post-
Warhol, post-Pop American art is rife with examples of painters
and sculptors whose work reflects the flatness (Super or
other wise) of ha nd- or computer-rendered cha racters a nd
settings. From the faux-tribal graffiti-isms of Keith Haring
to the Hanna-Barbera inflected fantasies of Kenny Scharf
and the frantic, rough-and-ready imaginings of Gary Panter,
the nations art is veined with a cartoonists embrace of
the playfully irrational. As the birthplace of the printed
comic strip, the animated cartoon, and the FX-driven movie,
it is unsurprising that a comfort with the dreamlike and the
fantastic has long since permeated the culture; neo-, post-,
or faux-Surrealism has emerged as A merican arts lingua
franca. Among the work of younger artists, one might point
to the visually comparable, though more politically abrasive,
characters and scenarios of a painter like Laylah Ali as a
productive comparison (fig. 32). Reviewing paired shows of Ali
and Nara at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2004,
critic David Bonetti points out that while Naras and Alis
motivations diverge at some key points, both artists make use
of cartoon-like characters to reflect on physical violence
and the brutal facts of social hierarchy. Bonetti writes of
Ali, Like Nara, she presents her bad news in cheery colors in
230 michael wilson
moved
childlike styles of representation, but her message quickly
wipes the smile off your face. 3
The description is evocative but not entirely accurate.
While Nara does make use of saturated color from time to time,
his palette tends far more often toward the muted. This choice
is one of several ways in which his signature aesthetic is
distinct not only from the majority of cartoonists but also
from key fine-art contemporaries such as Takashi Murakami in
Japan and Jeff Koons in the United States. Naras style in this
regard might be framed more helpfully in terms of the antique
sublime, the use of deliberate weathering. This extends to
Naras extensive use of reclaimed materials in the hut-like
constructions that he has used increasingly as gallery stand-
ins for his home and studio spaces. Produced in collaboration
with design firm graf and shown en masse as the exhibition
Figure 32
Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z at Yoshii Brick Brewhouse in 2006,
Figure 30
Laylah Ali (born 1968, United States) these self-contained structures, produced in response to their
Untitled, 2000 original exhibition environment, used locally sourced wood in
Walt Disney posing with some famous
Gouache on paper
cartoon characters, September 1953 a manner that, like Naras paintings and drawings, succeeds in
H. 7 x W. 6 in. (15.2 x 17.8 cm)
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York balancing clarity of design with a purposefully rough edge.
This roughnessa signifier not only of the handcrafted
but, further, of the imperfect or incompletefused as it is in
Naras oeuvre with continual references to childhood, suggests
a connection to another subgenre of American contemporary art,
one that peaked in the early 1990s (more or less coincident with
Naras graduation from the Dsseldorf Academy) but remains a
touchstone. Abject or slacker art, which arose in part as a
moved
response to the obsession of the previous decades artists
even when they were attempting self-directed critiquewith
the appearance of confident fluency, depends on a deliberate
courting of the damaged and distressed. Essentially a shabby-
chic variation on Pop, it is an art that, as curator Ralph
Rugoff phrases it in his introduction to the genre-defining
exhibition Just Pathetic at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los
Angeles in 1990, makes failure its medium. Abject art courts
a lowbrow aesthetic via the use of rough-and-ready or debased
materials but steers clear of the poignant in favor of low
comedy. It also often flaunts a deliberate disregard for art-
historical status and continuity.4
Naras work may lack the self-conscious irony with which
such an approach is generally associated (contrast the staccato
blurted captions in Naras work with the self-loathing run-
on rambles in Sean Landerss), but otherwise chimes with it
remarkably closely (fig. 33). One quintessentially American
artist whose rise coincided with the abject tendency but
whose achievement fully transcends its limits and connects
Figure 31
Margaret Keane (born 1927, United States) closely to Naras is Mike Kelley. Just as Nara is driven by
Long Lost Friends, 2005 punk music, Kelley is a longtime fan of, and participant in,
Oil on board
Detroits punk scene. And while Nara borrows from and, via
H. 14 x W. 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Margaret Keane his editioned figures, contributes to the history of toys
subject to change: yoshitomo nara and american culture 231
slightly smaller and moved
Figure 33
Sean Landers (born 1962, United States)
Fool Failure, 2003
Oil on linen
H. 72 x W. 108 in. (182.88 x 274.32 cm)
Sean Landers
in art, Kelley has, by smearing pitiful found examples with
psychosexual dirt in works such as More Love Hours Than Can
Ever Be Repaid (1987), done much the same (fig. 34). Kelleys
territory is the thrift store or the yard sale, and this
assortment of mangled dolls and teddy bears suggests that
there is nowhere to go but down. Kelleys art, like that of
fellow slackers Karen Kilimnik and Cary Liebowitz, hinges on a
poetics of misrecognitionan acute awareness of imperfection
made ma ni fest th rou g h a self-con sciously ra m shackle or
childlike aesthetic. The conjunction with Naras approach is
striking, though perhaps unsurprising in the context of a
flow of influence that has persisted from the middle of the
twentieth century to the present.
Tracing the roots of Naras painting in particular,
critic and curator Midori Matsui points to a much earlier
stylistic exchange between the United States and Japan that
one might also regard as having helped to make the artists
visual language comprehensible.5 Matsui traces elements of
Naras imagery to a species of strange figuration derived from
Cubism but otherwise on a path somewhat tangential to that of
academic modernism. This quirky approach to representation is,
she writes, observable in the work of two Japanese expatriate
painters both of whom made their mark in the United States
in the 1920s: Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Toshi Shimizu. Kuniyoshis
early canvases often featured the figure of a child with a
large head and wide eyes, portrayed from a birds-eye view,
which the artist borrowed from an American naive painting
he found in a Massachusetts antique shop. Shimizus work,
influenced by his teacher John Sloane, focuses on cityscapes
inhabited by familial figures, rendered in a style indebted
to Post-Impressionist abstraction.
232 michael wilson
moved
Figure 34
Mike Kelley (born 1954, United States)
More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be
Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987
Handmade stuffed animals and afghans
sewn on canvas backing, wax candles
on round base
H. 90 x W. 119 14 x D. 5 in.
(228.6 x 302.9 x 12.7 cm)
plus candles and base
Courtesy of Mike Kelley studio
Whether he was aware of them or not, echoes of both these
painters works are readily discernible in Naras iconography.
The same might be said of Henry Darger, who, while unknown
during his life, has latterly become a byword for a certain
aesthetic that resonates throughout contemporary practice
whenever it addresses the darker associations of childhood.
Da rgers vision is so ex treme, a nd was pu rsued with such
genuine obsessiveness, that it also has achieved a kind of
cult popularity largely external to its critical and even
formal achievement as figurative drawing and painting. In
this, too, it mirrors Naras position as a favorite of young
people for whom art history (and certainly art theory) is not
(or at least not yet) a consideration. Darger, a Chicagoa n
recluse who died in 1973, is now justly famous as the outsider
artist par excellence, his reputation resting in large part
on his hugely complex 15,125-page illustrated novel, The Story
of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the
Unreal, of the Glandego-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the
Child Slave Rebellion.
subject to change: yoshitomo nara and american culture 233
slightly cropped and moved
In 2000, the interior in which this tome, along with
other of Dargers works, was posthumously discovereda dank
one-room apartment in Chicagos Lincoln Park neighborhoodwas
re-created as a permanent exhibit at that citys Intuit: The
Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (fig. 35). The Henry Darger
Room at Intuit includes comic books and newspaper clippings,
childrens picture and coloring books, personal documents and
original fixtures and fittings from the abode at 851 Webster
Street, thereby simulating the intimate environment in which
the artist conjured his fantastic universe. It is an environment
crammed with telling detail and colored by the curious and
conflicted atmosphere that all such relocations share (the
rebuilding of Francis Bacons last studio in London at Dublin
City Gallery, The Hugh Lane elicits a similar combination of
voyeurism, nostalgia, and reverence). The Darger Room and its
ilk also chime with Naras hut installations, spaces that the
artist for the most part constructs inside the established
museum and gallery spaces as a way to inflect the viewers
experience and make what he considers a more appropriate home
for his smaller works and related artifacts, one that does not
inadvertently overwhelm or ossify their contents.
234 michael wilson
Figure 35
The Darger Room
Henry Darger Room Collection at Intuit:
The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
A number of American artists have made use of forms and
strategies comparable to this element of Naras work, either
through building physical structures, as is his preferred
method, or by treating existing institutional interiors as
their own (literal or metaphorical) working or living spaces.
New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg, for example, engineers
specific contexts for her videos by housing them inside
claustrophobic viewing pods, thereby heightening the feeling
of being immersed in the curious and often extremely cramped
environments depicted onscreen (fig. 36). The female protagonists
of Rottenbergs surreal micro-dramas are typically enmeshed in
bizarre invented industrial processes, locked into seemingly
useless but nonetheless labor-intensive tasks that allow for
unusually watchable takes on gender and body politics, Neo-
Marxist critique and the aesthetics of labor. The intent may
differ from that of the Japanese artist, but the look of the
structures is oddly similar, depending on a resolutely imperfect
(but perhaps all the more likable) approximation of real-world
architecture to introduce a certain strain of intimacy.
For his 2003 project Kult 48 Klubhouse, artist-curator
Scott Hug constructed a display site inside Deitch Projects
warehouse-like Brooklyn location that, while necessarily larger
than any of Rottenbergs single-work enclosures, might usefully
be compared to Naras in terms of its rough-and-ready look and
feel, and its emphasis on childhood (or, better, adolescence)
(fig. 37). Hugs labyrinthine environment was modeled after
the fantasy of an abandoned country house transformed by a
band of outsiders into a clandestine hangout, and contained
installations by Michael Magnan, Devendra Banhart, Matthew
Jackson, and several other artistic and musical collaborators.
Entirely open (though perhaps also somewhat tongue-in-cheek)
about its utopian underpinnings, Kult 48 Klubhouse was an
extension of Hugs earlier Teenage Rebel: The Bedroom Show,
staged at John Connelly Presents in New York the previous year.
Both exhibitions adopted an exuberantly cluttered style that,
while more deliberately chaotic than the look of Naras huts
(which are, after all, carefully plan ned arenas that, while
sometimes self-consciously messy, display a consistent and
even rather careful aesthetic) employ intense concentrations
of stuff to reflect on sensibilities in the midst of formation
and rebellion.
In 2009, another Deitch Projects presentation, Jonah
Freeman and Justin Lowes exhibition Black Acid Co-op seemed
to represent the zenith of a species of wildly a mbitious
installation practice with which Naras collaborative design and
production of multifunctional huts might usefully be aligned
(fig. 38a,b). A follow-up to an installation titled Hello Meth
Lab In The Sun that the duo produced with Alexandre Singh at
Ballroom Marfa (a variation, Hello Meth Lab With A View, was
later installed in a duplex apartment at the Station in Miami,
subject to change: yoshitomo nara and american culture 235
slightly moved slightly moved

Figure 36 Figure 38a,b

Mika Rottenberg (born 1976, Argentina) Black Acid Co-op, 2003
Cheese, 2008 Mixed media
Multi-channel video installation Dimensions variable
Installation at 2008 Whitney Biennial, Courtesy of Deitch Projects

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Collection of Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy

Figure 37
Kult 48 Klubhouse, 2003
Installation project
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of K48, Deitch Projects,
and John Connelly Presents

Florida), this sprawling spatial collage not only completely studios as such, and though the work was presented as fully
filled but utterly transformed Deitchs warehouse-like Wooster finished, there persisted the impression of a creative arena
Street premises. Dividing the interior into a network of and/or work-in-progress of one (albeit, perhaps, indefinable)
rooms and interceding spaces, Freeman and Lowe employed a sort or another. Nara has most often pursued the making of
system of wires, ducts, and tubes to connect a sequence of quasi-dislocated structures that frequently echo or extend his
rooms conceived in wildly divergent styles, spinning in the own living and working spaces, but he has also gestured toward
process a loose narrative concerning the embedding of sub- and an all-in alteration of gallery interiors with works such as
counter-cultural elements in urban environments. The inclusion London Mayfair House, which subsumed Stephen Friedman Gallery
of a cell for the manufacture of illegal drugs alongside in London in 2006. While not reworking the permanent structure
domestic, commercial, museological, and mystical-scientific of the room, this project customized a viewers experience of
sets created a radically hybrid site that destabilized firm it with a completeness that might be compared to installations
conclusions even as it literally shifted the ground under such as Thomas Hirschhorns Cavemanman, first installed at the
viewers feet. And while none of the rooms was modeled after Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 2002.

236 michael wilson subject to change: yoshitomo nara and american culture 237
 But the tropes found in Naras work and shared by various
modern and contemporary American artists are also present in
other fields of the national culture, especially popular forms
such as mainstream film and childrens literature. The figure
of the self-possessed, willful, often mysterious, sometimes
malevolent, and occasionally openly violent child in Naras
paintings and drawings, for example, finds an echo in the evil
child subgenre of American horror movies. Beginning with The
Bad Seed and The Village of the Damned in the mid-1950s and the
early 1960s, and continuing through the characters of Damien
in the Omen saga and Chucky in the Childs Play series, to the
Japanese hit Ringu (1998) and its Hollywood remake The Ring
(2002), the evil child has been a consistent presence since
before Nara was born. As do Naras images, these films question
the ideal of childhood innocence by emphasizing (and visibly
exaggerating) the childs anarchic spirit. When children, who
are conventionally portrayed as entirely in thrall to adult
power and authority, are seen to take control, the sense of
them as commanders of a secret or otherwise inaccessible world
of their own comes to the fore. It is this possibility as much
as any criminal wrongdoing (though this, of course, appears
too) that frightens and fascinates.
Related ideas crop up with some regularity in popular
American literature for and about young children. The 2009
filmic interpretation of Maurice Sendaks classic Where the Wild
Things Are (1963) by Spike Jonzeand Dave Eggerss concurrent
novelization thereofserves to remind us that the storys
rambunctious infant protagonist, Max, might, with his onesie
romper suit, stylized crown, and capital-A Attitude, have leapt
straight from a Nara canvas. The anarchy in Dr. Seusss The Cat
in the Hat (1957), meanwhile, may be sparked by the eponymous
feline antihero, but the young human characters dont hesitate
to join in, again in a particular heedless spirit of a kind
peculiar to preschoolers, and in lawless harmony with Naras
diminutive subjects. Amongst literature for slightly older
children, a tridecalogy titled A Series of Unfortunate Events
by Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler), chronicling the
adventures of the Baudelaire children, parallels elements of
Naras world in its darkly humorous allusions to infant self-
determination. The Baudelaires, orphaned by their parents
death in a fire, are all highly intelligent, and their
tribulations generally entail working against unwanted adult
intervention. The youngest, Sunny, is a baby at the beginning
of the series and her brief utterances are often reminiscent
of Naras subjects truncated phraseology.
There are many other examples along these lines, but,
ironically, the one childrens book that Nara himself has
written and illustrated to date, The Lonesome Puppy (2008), isnt
among them, strictly speaking. The disjunction is, however,
appropriate; as iconic as Naras work appears at first, it
238 michael wilson
remains subject to change and development, in terms of tone and
mood as much as medium and method. The artist has staked out a
certain territory or unabashedly personal cosmologyone that
exists at the intersection of American and Japanese culture (or
at least his own vision of what the most significant elements of
each might be)and he is concerned not with purifying or even
necessarily concentrating the manipulation and presentation
of those cultures, but rather with expanding the range of
meanings and associations that they carry.
Naras art is accessible internationally because its
themes are universal and its imagery has an immediacy that
transcends art-world codification and obscurantism. That it
exhibits such strong and deep-seated links to the history and
evolution of American art and culture in particular reflects
a broader flow of influence that ranges, as the examples
discussed here reveal, from the immediately familiar to the
more selectively known. Disney, Warner Bros., Marvel, and their
popular American derivations have had at least as powerful
an influence on Naras practice as has the more often-cited
manga. Moreover, the propinquity of his work to what Jack
Bankowsky terms Pop after Pop (a Neo or Post Pop mode that
borrows heavily from its predecessor and is itself fuelled
by mainstream [readactually or in spiritwestern] visual
culture of all stripes) affords it a ready continuity with
recent art made for museum and gallery audiences.6 Crucially,
however, Nara manages to absorb such influences without
also adopting the cynicism with which American artists in
particular have habitually freighted their approach. This
scope, extraordinary but thus lightly worn, is mirrored in
what is not so much an imaginary or alternate world as an
intensified extension of the artists own past and present.
Notes
1. 
My Superficiality is Only a Game: A Conversation between Stephan Trescher and
Yoshitomo Nara, in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket (Nrnberg: Verlag fr
Moderne Kunst Nrnberg, 2002), 105.
2. 
M argaret Keane generally signed her paintings of children with large, round
eyes Keane, in capital block letters. The paintings of older girls with
almond-shaped eyes were signed MDH Keane, in script.
3. 
D avid Bonetti, The cute, the strange, the marvelous make Nara show a happening
thing, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 5, 2004.
4. 
S ee also Michael Wilson, Just Pathetic, Artforum 43, no. 2 (October 2004):
11718.
5. 
M idori Matsui, A Gaze from Outside: Merits of the Minor in Yoshitomo Naras
Painting, in Yoshitomo Nara: I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me (Kyoto: Tan kosha,
2001), 16869.
6. 
Jack Bankowsky, Pop after Pop: A Roundtable, Artforum 43, no. 2 (October 2004).
Ban kowsky frames the term by asking, Is there something in the Pop paradigm
but also in the grumbles of Pops discontentsthat points to what is at stake in
making art out of our contemporary world? How much does historical Pop (not just
high New York Pop, but also British proto-Pop; not just the Warhol of the soup
cans, but also of the films and the capacious art/life jugglings) tell us about
the myriad ways artists work with, through, and even in pop culture today?
subject to change: yoshitomo nara and american culture 239
 From S.M.L. to A to Z and YNG

Hideki Toyoshima

When I was first introduced to Nara-san, I was a bit intimidated.

To be honest, Id even say I was wary of him.

Why dont you do something with him? A common acquaintance

of ours brought Nara-san over to graf media gm, an alternative
space in Osaka that I was running with my friends. It was
around the spring of 2003. After casually introducing himself,
Nara-san looked around our space and nodded a few times,
like hrm hrm. Then he said, I bet itll be good to have
three rooms in here. That was an actual installation plan
conceived by Nara-san even before we started to talk about
any exhibition at all. Reacting to this sudden proposal,
something beyond my wariness, like something closer to a
defense mechanism, cran ked up the level of pressure in me.
Excuse me, but, does that mean it is an exhibition where you
make us make something, or an exhibition we make together?
My heart was beating faster and faster, but I tried to subdue
it so Nara-san wouldnt notice. He nonchalantly responded,
Ah, of course, well make it together. That is how our first
collaboration, S.M.L., started (fig. 39a,b).
One night after we had finished the installation of
S.M.L., Nara-san and I grabbed a beer without asking (as
usual) from a refrigerator in a bar annexed to our space to
celebrate the completion of the work. Among the three rooms in
varying sizes of S.M.L., the M-size room was created in an
image of his studio. The room, which was bare and empty in the
beginning, was gradually filled with odds-and-ends from Nara-
sans real studio: his paints, drawings, empty wine bottles,
cigarette butts, and so on. For ten days while he was in Osaka
to work with us, I visited him in the M-size room, like I
would my old friend, almost every night after the days work
was done, and talked over beers about so many things with him.
Figure 39a,b Most of our conversations were about negligible trifles from
Yoshitomo Nara
our student days that had nothing to do with art, or stories
S.M.L., 2003
graf media gm, about countries each of us had traveled to and people we had
Osaka, Japan met, things from the past, things for the future, and so on and

240 hideki toyoshima 241

slightly moved cropping changed slightly
Figure 40 a,b
Yoshitomo Nara + graf
Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z, 2006
Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki,
Aomori prefecture, Japan
above left
Figure 41a
Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade,
20067
Organized by 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Studio Cafe yngm:k Session,
February 24, 2007
Live: Seiichi Yamamoto
DJ: Yoshitomo Nara, Mao Yamazaki (graf
media gm), Ryo Aoyanagi (graf media gm)
above right
Figure 41b
Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade,
20067
Organized by 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Studio Cafe yngm:k Session,
February 25, 2007
Live: kiiiiiii
DJ: Yoshitomo Nara, Mao Yamazaki (graf
on. Hed be talking, picking and playing music on a CD player; media gm), Ryo Aoyanagi (graf media gm)
and all the while, he would always be drawing on the back of Food: nampushokudo
envelopes scattered about here and there, and pinning them up
on the walls. Just like this, the time spent in the M-size room
became an important part of the installation itself.
At night when all the work, and much drinking, was done,
Nara-san and I got excited talking about a dream of a distant
future, which, at the time, we had no obligation whatsoever to
make come true: Why end with S.M.L.? Why not make C or P or
R? Really, why not make houses all named from A to Z, and make
a town called A to Z! For us (or at least for me), that was
a really outrageous idea, and we never imagined that we would
actually make it happen three years later. If we had known,
we would have probably dreamt up a more modest plan.
242 hideki toyoshima
A fter S.M.L. we continued to collaborate on Nara-
sans exhibitions that toured in Japan and to other parts
of Asia, including Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand, and also on
his gallery exhibitions in New York and London, and even on
international exhibitions such as the Yokohama Triennale.
Th rou g h all these works, ou r collaborative relation ship
became closer and closer, and we grew into something of a
team, called Yoshitomo Nara + graf.
The exhibition Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z was held in
2006 at a huge brick building that used to be a brewery for cider
in Nara-sans hometown, Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture (fig.
40a,b). For preparation of the show, I moved out of my apartment
in Osaka and lived in Hirosaki for half a year. The exhibition
was realized with the help of locals and of volunteers from
all over the country who responded and rushed to our call for
help. In the beginning, we planned to create twenty-six huts,
corresponding to all the letters in the alphabet from A to Z,
but the idea evolved greatly, and in the end, there emerged
forty-four spaces, including some existing rooms of the brick
building. Besides Nara-san, we asked seven other artists we
knew well to become inhabitants of the A to Z town. I think
A to Z made quite a strong impact on my way of thinking and
my life. Perhaps everyonemyself, Nara-san, members of graf,
the volunteers, and even the visitors to the showexperienced
something that can be explained as before and after A to Z.
But, I imagine that we would only come to understand, in a
distant future, what exactly that something was.
After A to Z, we had a residency project at the 21st
Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, from which came
a new installation, yngm:k, which consisted of Nara-sans
studio and a caf (fig. 41a,b).1 We kept on going, working
from s.m.l. to a to z and yng 243
 both larger

Figure 42a Figure 42b

YNG
Bintang House (interior), 2008
KITA!!: Japanese Artists Meet
Indonesia, Cemeti Art House,
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
YNG
Bintang House, 2008
KITA!!: Japanese Artists Meet
Indonesia, Cemeti Art House,
Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Figure 43
Yoshitomo Nara + graf
Yoshitomo Nara + graf, 2007
GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art,
The Hague, the Netherlands

on installations in Europe, Asia, the United States, and

Australia (figs. 42a,b and 43). Installations gradually became
more sculptural. I became independent from graf, where I had
worked for over ten years, and with me being apart from graf,
Yoshitomo Nara + graf became, simply, YNG.
YNG is slowly changing like a family does. The main
point is to have fu n with the events that happen during
this process of change as we should enjoy our life. My wary
meeting with Nara-san at the beginning of this journey was Note
1. 
y ng m:k was a hut-shaped wooden str ucture that fu nctioned as a caf as well
transformed into something like a belief. And this belief leads as a music and performance space. A studio space for Nara was annexed to the
me to hope for new encounters and departures at various times caf space, and visitors were able to peek into the studio through windows.
and locations as welike backpackers making no promises Nara actually worked in this studio after hours, and the museum periodically
allowed access to the studio interior. The concept of creating such alternative
continue our journey in anticipation for a surprising reunion space began during the A to Z exhibition, which included a space called gm:
somewhere, some time. HIROSAKI, a precursor to yngm:k.

244 hideki toyoshima from s.m.l. to a to z and yng 245

 plates

Installations

246
Yoshitomo Nara
New Seoul House Mini, 2007
Installation at Leeum, Samsung Museum
of Art, Seoul, Korea

248 249
Yoshitomo Nara + graf
Torre de Mlaga, 2007
Torre de Mlaga, CAC Mlaga

250 251
 YNG
Installation by YNG at BALTIC Centre California Orange Covered Wagon, 2008
for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Yoshitomo Nara, Blum & Poe,
United Kingdom, 2008 Los Angeles, California

252 253
YNG
Yoshitomo Nara, 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY

254 255
NARA VOICE
Selections from the Artists Blog
2008/11/05
On record jackets
Category: Nara Voice/Yoshitomo Nara Blog
Blogger: yn
When I was spending most of my allowance on records, I still
couldnt afford everything I wanted, so I bought records
with my friends. Each of us would buy what we were assigned
to, then, wed later swap what we got. So, I still have a huge
collection of music recorded on cassette tapes.
Since I began to paint and exhibit my work abroad on occasion,
I have had more chances to travel to the places where the
music I like originated. When opportunities like that arise,
I incessantly visit used record shops in search of original
records that I have only as cassette tapes. Of course, I also
buy CDs, but after all, vinyl has its own unique appeal, and
I cant help wanting it.
Many albu m jackets, too, are so u niq ue that I want to hang
them on my walls. For example, the jacket of Al Andersons
first album from Vanguard (1969?) looks like a work by the
German painter Gerhard Richter. Ch ris Smithers portrait
photographs from his first albums must also whet the appetite
of art lovers.
You often discover that your favorite artist did the art
for your favorite album only after you begin to learn about
art. Intrinsically, record jackets play an important role
as visual art that adds to the sound itself; album art is
the result of a collaboration between auditory sensation and
visual perception. And, speaking of looking at art, theres
no doubt that any picture would look better large rather than
small, so I go for real record jackets rather than CDs.
Just like your favorite artists or paintings come in a variety
a nd you ca nt bu ndle them up into one group, albu m art has
numerous variations; some have great photographs, others come
with great illustrations, designs, etc. So much great art...I
cant stop collecting~. Once I spilled coffee over a jacket. It
didnt affect the sound, but I ended up buying the same record
again (laugh ...
). That just goes to show how much value album
jackets have for me.
256
2009/04/14
Teen-years: From the stories of my records, Part 1
Category: Nara Voice/Yoshitomo Nara Blog
Blogger: yn
Just remembered. D u ri n g the spri n g brea k of m y fresh ma n
year in high school, I hopped on an overnight train to Tokyo
[from Aomori] to go to Neil Youngs concert. Thats right. A
bunch of us delinquent kids crashed at Kotas older brothers
apartment; he was a college student in Tokyo at the time.
Ever since our junior year in high school, Kota and I would
go together to live concerts of Carol (Ei-chan!), Kenji Endo,
and Gedo!1 Back then, only a few kids at school were listening
to rock. The majority of music frea ks were into classical
music, and, overhearing their conversations like Chaikos
go-ban [Symphony No. 5 by Tchaikovsky] is the best~, Id be
quietly reading things like New Music Magazine. I was so
much more into reading this magazine than focusing on exams.
I read it so intensely that I even memorized most of its
contents, including the ads. Needless to say, this gave me
bragging rights everyday after school at Kotas house. Notable
advertisements from this monthly magazine were from record
shops, like Meruri-do [in Kichijo-ji] (when I moved to Tokyo,
I bought most of my music from this store), Pied Piper House
[in Aoyama], and Edison in Shimokitazawa. I also remember ads
for rokku kissa [rock cafs] such as Akage to Sobakasu [Red
Hair and Freckles, in Kichijo-ji], Black Hawk, and B.Y.G. [both
located in Shibuya]. I anxiously waited every month to see
which album jacket would appear in Black Hawks ads. If they
used one that I had, Id smile in satisfaction, and when they
chose something I didnt know, I desperately searched for that
record
...
(to be continued)
New Music Magazine, 1978
nara voice 257
2009/04/16
Teen-years: From the stories of my records, Part 2
Category: Nara Voice/Yoshitomo Nara Blog
Blogger: yn
When I was a junior in high school, I worked with some older
guys to turn a garage into a rock caf. It was named 33 1/3!
I often DJed there. I remember how proud I felt when older
college students asked me about my selection of songs and
music. I was packing as much information as possible into my
little brain. I felt like I had all these experiences of stuff
that I hadnt yet actually experienced. Everyone around me
was older than me, and they all treated this precocious kid
so kindly...
Thats right, it was those sleepless nights back then! Those
nights Id bike around the town till I was exhausted, riding
back and forth in front of the house of a girl that I liked
...
If
her room light was on, I felt 120% sure: Shes there! With my
heart pounding, Id ride back home and tune into a midnight
radio station.
...
O ne such night, one song that played from the radio blew my
mind ...
M y whole precocious self was blown away! That song lit
a fire in my raw, teenage emotion.
It was the Ramones! And then Sex Pistols, and The Clash, and
Bob Marley
...
They gave me an answer to how Id live my life
from then on.
I want to live in a way I believe and desire!...
B ut, well,
the truth is, back then I had no idea what that meant in
reality
...
(How pathetic~, I think, but my pursuit continues forever)
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Todays kids, this is whats called a cassette tape!
258
2009/05/06
May 2nd
Category: Nara Voice/Yoshitomo Nara Blog
Blogger: yn
It was my mothers 77th birthday, and the birthday of Michi in
The Netherlands, and the wedding anniversary of F, a friend
of mine from college. It was the morning of the second day
after I had arrived in New York, and maybe because of jetlag,
I woke up before six and was staring out the window. The
weather forecast for the day was cloudy with sporadic rain.
Far outside of the window was a stretch of cloudy sky looking a
bit too cold for May. I went for a walk, but found it, in fact,
quite cold. I started to walk with my hands in my pockets. The
city in the early morning was too quiet, and I wondered if it
really was the big city, New York. Images from Will Smiths
movie I am Legend flickered through my mind, and feeling a bit
scared, I turned back toward the hotel. Just as I started to
walk back at a brisk pace, a flash of sunlight broke through
the cloudy sky, and brightly lit my way along Ninth Avenue.
It lasted perhaps only several seconds, but it made me think
that going to heaven would be such a blissful experience if it
happened in this way. It made me feel so gentle...
Back in the hotel, I was trying to warm up my cold body in
bed. My cell phone began signaling a voicemail. I left it
unchecked, but the signal sound continued to ring; one more,
then more, and more. I finally picked up my cell phone
......
Hey
everyone~, todays May 2nd, not April 1st!....Just like that,
I found out about the death of Kiyoshiro......
2
I had breakfast at a caf in the W Hotel in Union Square with
the staff from Asia Society Museum, where I will have my solo
exhibition next year. The breakfast meeting went very well,
and I felt like I was still in a dream. Afterward, I went to
the New Museum designed by SANAA, strolled around SoHo, and
grabbed a beer at a neighborhood caf. I came back to the
hotel feeling tipsy, took a bath, and laid down for a bit.
That night, I went for sushi dinner with Libby, a filmmaker.
I had done some drawings for the animation used for her
documentary film Playground.3 It was a completely voluntary
participation, and all the great musicians who provided their
music for the soundtrack also did so as volunteers. In fact,
it was for the screening of this film, Playground, during the
Tribeca Film Festival that I came to New York. The content
of this film was very heavy, so some short animations were
inserted to mark the changes of scenes. The film itself was
all in English and I honestly couldnt tell if I completely
understood it, but it was very heavy. After the preview, there
nara voice 259
were many questions asked about the theme of the film. I was
invited to fly there to attend this preview, but I thought
maybe the money could have been used for a better cause than to
bring me here. I felt ashamed of myself, having thoughtlessly
accepted the invitation.
wanted to meet Kiyoshiro, if at all possible. Back then, I
wanted to talk to him about, Im not sure what exactly, but
things about Otis, Lennon, Mick, Doris Allen, Liverpool, or
the Bay Area
......
7
I wanted to just meet him and be assured
that he is just an everyday man.

I missed the timing to call my mother back home

...
I also couldnt The last time I saw him was at the Fuji Rock [Festival]
...
It
call F; we had rekindled our friendship this year after more was drizzling, and the King himself was shouting. We [my
than ten years. I feel like the first message of Kiyoshiros friends and I] squeezed our way into the crowd and moved
death came with that flash of sunlight shining down on the forward toward the front row. The stage was shining.
street from the cloudy sky between the skyscrapers.
When more time passes, I want to come back with a calm heart
In my head, the song Kimi ga boku o shitteru [You know me] to talk more about him.
by Chabo and Kiyoshiro kept playing on and on.4

Now, its the morning of May 6th. Im back in Japan and just
completed one painting. Lately, Ive been updating this blog
pretty often, but the shock of Kiyoshiros passing was such
that I couldnt really function normally or paint for almost
four days. I was searching online for as many live concert
clips of him as I could watch ...
ones from the past and ones
from more recent days...
ones in which hes playing that song
with Chabo...
standing on the corner of Tamaran-zaka, and he
is singing along with his acoustic guitar.5 That stone wall is
also already gone now.

Kiyoshiro has been with me ever since I became so invested

in music. Or, more specifically, he was my senpai [senior or
mentor], full of rebellious spirit. Whether folk or rock didnt
matter; RC was always cool. The album jacket design of Single
Man [1976] made me tip my hat to him. When I moved from Tokyo
to Aichi prefecture, I put everything on a truck and on that
truck, sitting in the middle of all my stuff, I listened to
the live album Rhapsody [1980] the entire way [from Tokyo to
Aichi; about 180 miles]. While I was in Germany, my friend
back home sent me a cassette tape recording of the performance
by The Timers. Under the sky in Germany, I listened to this 2009/06/16
recording of the Tokyo FM Yoru no hitto sutajio [Evening Hit From London 2
Studio] incident.6 On the way to school, pedaling my bike, I Category: Nara Voice/Yoshitomo Nara Blog
sang along out loud as I laughed hard. Blogger: yn

Alas, I still cant put my feeling of gratitude to Kiyoshiro
into words very well
...
About three years ago, some newspaper made me an offer: Well
set up an interview with your favorite person, or a person you
most want to meet! Right away I answered, OK, then, Imawano
Kiyoshiro-san! They told me that he was already featured
once before, so choose someone else...
So I said,
...
then, no
thank you because I cant think of anyone else now~. I really
Oh~ Yeah~! I saw Yo La Tengo~~!
Its a miracle I found the contact information of the bassist,
James, in Outlook in the laptop computer that I carried for
this trip. He got me into their live concert as a guest, which
I enjoyed 200%. And, in the seat in front of me was ...
the
bassist of The Raincoats, Gina Birch~. Wow~ Kurt Cobain was a
big fan of this band. The Raincoats drummers children are
now themselves a band called Kitty, Daisy & Lewis, and are

260 nara voice 261

rising higher and higher in the hits charts ...
They are cast
in Dustin Hoffmans new film. Whats it called, Last Chance?
8
After the concert, I got to talk to Gina backstage, and I was so
happy! She told me that shes now filming, or editing, something
like a documentary film about The Raincoats. Speaking of
which, shes actually a graduate of the film department of
RCA (Royal Academy of Arts). The title will be The Raincoats
Fairytales, and she said itll soon be completed. CANT WAIT!
By the way, the music video of The Raincoats song Fairytale
in the Supermarket was shot by Gina~ http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=MZJt56z5Ywc&feature=related e
A ny way, I was surprised that Yo La Tengos Ira [Kaplan]
remembered my favorites like Don Nix, and so on. Then, Dan
Penn! Kiyoshiro mentioned Dan Penn like three times in his
book (Hinshi no sugoroku donya) [Moribund sugoroku/sugo-rock
warehouse]! I never imagined Id end up talking with Ira about
Dan Penn. Somehow, whenever I start talking about music,
English ceases to be a burden~e
Well then, see you, Yo La Tengo, in Japan in December~~!
Good night! (Its still midnight here even if its the morning
in Japan!)
2009/09/07
NEVER Forget
Category: Nara Voice/Yoshitomo Nara Blog
Blogger: yn
Its been a while since I looked at the photo documentation
book of the exhibition S.M.L. The images capture all the
things that were new to me back then, and now they look so
fresh. Its a straight documentation, but this book shows that
time in my past with certainty.
Then, I looked at Studio Portrait, with photographs by Morimoto.9
I felt the fresh blue sky from the page with [my assistants]
Zashikiwarashi and Sakamotoen. Its midnight now, but its
as if a breeze were blowing up toward the blue sky from this
room. These pictures were from almost ten years ago, but I
feel them close to me as though it were yesterday.
F r e e do m co m e s w h e n y o u de si r e n oth i n g. Iv e h a d m a n y
invitations, but next year is my solo ex hibition at Asia
Society. Im going to do my best to paint my very best.
262
I dont wanna make the beginners spirit just a front. Even
if I need to destroy everything, I want to live by the feeling
of that time. (from my journal of April 18, 2001)
I say to myself as many times as necessary! NEVER FORGET!
When in doubt, lets backtrack a bit.
Id be called a fool, but to me its just fine.
I touch that time [in the past], and then again I come back.
Notes
1. 
Carol is a Japanese rock band active from 1972 to 1975. Eikichi Yazawa (born
1949), a.k.a. Ei-chan, was the bands bassist and vocalist. Kenji Endo (born
1947) is a singer-song writer in the genre of folk and rock. Gedo is a Japanese
rock band that debuted in 1973, and, after various changes of its members, it
still has a strong fan base today.
2. 
K iyoshiro Imawano (19512009) was a legendary rock musician and singer-
songwriter who led influential bands such as RC Succession (19691991), among
others. RC Succession, often simply called RC by its fans, played a key role in
the popularization of rock songs sung in Japanese. In Japan, Kiyoshiro Imawano
was, and still is, referred to as the king of rock, as Nara calls him with
reverence later in this blog entry.
3. 
Playground is a documentary film directed by Libby Spears about the epidemic
of sexual exploitation of children, particularly focusing on its prevalence
in the United States. George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Steven Soderbergh were
executive producers; the artwork was done by Yoshitomo Nara; and animation by
Heather Bursch. Music was provided by Bjork, Radiohead, and Chris Martin, among
others. For more details, see, http://www.playgroundproject.com/film/.
4. 
Reichi Nakaido (born 1950), a.k.a. Chabo, is a guitarist and vocalist. He was
part of RC Succession, and after the group disbanded, he often collaborated
with Kiyoshiro Imawano.
5. 
Tamaran-zaka is a slope located between Kunitachi and Kokubun-ji, Tokyo;
Kiyoshiro lodged nearby for a brief period of time before he became famous.
The location was made famous in RC Successions song Tamaran-zaka (1981).
As Nara mentions later, a stone wall once stood along the slope and became a
kind of pilgrimage site for RC fans, who marked their visits to the location
on that stone wall. It was demolished in 2002 for the development of a high-
rise building.
6. 
T he incident happened in 1989 when a rock band, The Timers (formed in 1988 by
Kiyoshiro in disguise), was invited to perform during a popular live music
program on Fuji Television Network, called Yoru no hitto sutajio (Evening Hit
Studio). The band was scheduled to play Gizensha (Hypocrite) among other
songs, but it suddenly switched to another song, FM Tokyo no uta (A Song for
Tokyo FM), which scorched radio station Tokyo FM with words prohibited on the
air. This act was said to have been revenge directed at the radio station that
self-censored airing Love Me Tender and The Summer Time Blues, the protest
songs by RC Succession against the development of nuclear weapons and energy
plants. The Timers is known for many such controversies caused mostly by its
critical stance toward social and political issues, including antiwar and
antinuclear issues.
7. 
O tis Redding, John Lennon, Mick Jagger. The Liverpool Sound is a term used
in Japan that indicates the early to mid-1960s U.K. rock music, and is close
to the term British beat. The Bay Area Sound is a rock movement out of San
Francisco that began in the late 1960s and is most often identified with such
bands as Jefferson Airplane.
8. 
L ast Chance Harvey, w ritten and directed by Joel Hopkins, was released in
January 2009.
9. 
M ie Morimoto, Studio Portrait: Nara Yoshitomo no seisaku fukei [Studio Portrait:
A Documentary of Artist Yoshitomo Nara] (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppan-sha, 2003).
nara voice 263
Biography and
Selected Solo Exhibitions
1959
Born on December 5 in Hirosaki,
Aomori prefecture, Japan
1979
Entered Painting Department at
Musashino Art University, Tokyo,
Japan
1980
Saw The Star Club, one of Japans
first punk bands, perform live for
the first time in Tokyo
Traveled outside Japan for the
first time to Europe and Pakistan
where he discovered that music can
be a universal language. Although
he did nt spea k a n y foreig n
languages, he was able to connect
with people through the mention of
musicians or songs.
1981
Transferred from Musashino Art
University to Aichi Prefectural
University of Fine Arts and Music,
Aichi prefecture, Japan; majored
in oil painting
1983
Traveled to Europe and China,
and was introduced to Londons
punk scene
Formed the band Kazoku Keikaku
(The Family Plan) with friends;
wrote songs and was the lead
vocalist and guitar player
1985
Completed Bachelor of Arts and
began the Master of Arts program
at Aichi Prefectural University
of Fine Arts and Music
1987 Conceived the idea for a childrens
Completed Master of Arts program
1988
First international touring solo
exhibition, Innocent Being,
264
at Galerie Humanit, Nagoya
and Tokyo, Japan, and Goethe-
Institute, Dsseldorf, Germany
Moved to Germany and began
studying at Kunstakademie
Dsseldorf
1990
Designed album art for The Birdy
Num Nums, a German New Wave band
1991
First solo exhibition in Japan
after movi n g to Ger ma n y at
Galerie Humanit, Nagoya, Aichi
Prefecture, Japan
1993
Completed Meisterschler (Master
of A rts) from A. R. Penck at
Ku n sta kademie Dsseldorf,
Germany; continued to live and
work in Germany
Be Happy, Galerie Humanit,
Nagoya and Tokyo, Japan
1994
Lonesome Babies, Hak utosha,
Nagoya, Japan
Moved to Cologne, Germany, where
he lived and worked until 2000
1995
In the Deepest Puddle, Scai the
Bathhouse, Tokyo
First solo ex hibition i n the
United States, Pacific Babies,
at Blu m & Poe, Sa nta Monica,
California
Received the Award for Artist from
Nagoya City, Aichi prefecture,
Japan
1996
book, titled The Lonesome Puppy,
with artist Hiroshi Sugito and
exhibited the original drawings
at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
1997
First monograph, In the Deepest
Puddle, published by Kadokawa
Shoten, Tokyo
Screen Memory, Tomio Koyama
Gallery, Tokyo
1998 prefecture]
Guest Professor at University of
California, Los Angeles, for three
months; taught a postgraduate
painting course. During his stay,
Nara shared a room with artist
Takashi Murakami, who was also
a guest professor at the time.
Yoshitomo Nara, The Institute
of Visual Arts, University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Second monograph, Slash with a
Knife, published by Little More,
Tokyo
1999
Launched the website Happy Hour
and began the blog Nara Voice
Somebody Whispers in Nrnberg,
Institute of Modern Art at
Schmidt Bank Galerie, Nrnberg,
Germany
Pave Your Dreams, Marian ne
Boesky Gallery, New York
Japanese edition of the childrens
book The Lonesome Puppy published
by Magazine House, Tokyo
Recorded background vocals for
The Star Club
2000
Walk On, Museum of Contemporary
Art Chicago, Illinois
Lullaby Super market, Sa nta
Monica Museum of Art, California
Moved back to Japan; lived and
worked in Tokyo u ntil 2005
2001
I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me,
Yokohama Museum of Art, Kanagawa
prefecture, Japan [Touring
Exhibition in Japan: 2002, Ashiya
City Museum of Art and History,
Hyogo prefectu re; Hiroshi ma
City Museu m of Contemporary
A rt, Hiroshi ma prefectu re;
Hok kaido Asahikawa Museu m of
Art, Asahikawa, Hokkaido; Yoshii
Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Aomori
2002
Who Snatched the Babies? Centre
National de lEstampe et de lArt
Imprim, Chatou, France
Saucer Tales, Marian ne Boesky
Gallery, New York
Traveled to Afghanistan and
Pa kistan and took photographs
of everyday life, which were
published in a special issue
of the magazine Foil, titled
No War, in January 2003
2003
Met Hideki Toyoshima at the graf
media gm studio in Osaka, Japan
Nothing Ever Happens, Museum Yoshitomo Na ra: Moonlight
of Contemporary Art, Cleveland,
Ohio [Touring Exhibition in the
United States: 2004, Institute
of Contemporary Art, University
of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia;
San Jose Museum of Art, California;
20042005, Contemporary Art
Museum St. Louis, Missouri; 2005,
The Contemporary Museum Honolulu,
Hawaii]
S.M.L., graf media g m, Osa ka
The Good, the Bad, the Average
and Unique, Little More Gallery,
Tokyo
2004
From the Depth of My Drawer,
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art,
Tokyo [Tou ri n g Ex hibition i n
Japan and Korea: Kanaz Forest of
Creation, Fukui prefecture, Japan;
2005, Yonago City Museum of Art,
Tottori prefecture, Japan; Yoshii
Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Aomori
prefecture, Japan; Rodin Gallery,
Seoul, Korea]
Shallow Puddles, graf media gm,
Osaka, Japan
20042005
Over the Rainbow: Collaboration
works with Hiroshi Sugito,
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich,
Germany [2005, K-21; Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dsseldorf,
Germany]
2005
Moved to Tochigi prefectu re,
Japan, where he currently lives
and works
2006
A to Z Caf, designed by Yoshitomo
Nara + graf, opened in Aoyama,
Tokyo
Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z,
Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki,
Aomori prefecture, Japan
Serenade, 21st Century Museu m
of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa,
Ishikawa prefecture, Japan
2007
Yoshitomo Nara + graf: Torre de
Mlaga, Mlaga Contemporary Art
Center, Spain
2008
Yoshitomo Nara + graf, BALTIC
Centre for Contemporary Art,
Gateshead, United Kingdom
2009
The Crated Rooms in Iceland
Yoshitomo Nara + YNG, Reykjavik
Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland
265
Selected Group Exhibitions
1988
Feeling House, Mie Prefectural
Art Museum, Mie prefecture, Japan
1992
Tijdelijk Asiel, Arti et
A micitiae, A msterda m, The
Netherlands
1994
My Room is Your Room, The 7th
Nagoya Contemporary Art Fair,
Nagoya City Gallery, Japan
1995 Museum, Sacramento, California;
The Future of Paintings, 1995,
Osaka Contemporary Art Center,
Japan
POSITIV, Museu m am Ostwall,
Dortmund, Germany
1996 Washington; The Huntsville Museum
Inta n gible Child hood, Mie
Prefectu ral A rt Museu m, Mie
prefecture, Japan
TOKYO POP, The Hiratsuka Museum
of Art, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan
Ironic Fantasy, The Miyagi
Museu m of Art, Sendai, Miyagi
prefecture, Japan
1997 and Nagoya, Japan
Dream of Existence, Kiscelli
Museum, Budapest, Hungary
Japa nese Contemporary A rt
Exhibition, The National Museum
of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea
1998 Presumed Innocent, CAPC Muse
The Manga Age, Museu m of
Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan
1999 San Francisco Museum of Modern
ART/DOMESTIC, Temperature of the
Time, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo
New Modernism for a New Millennium:
Works by Contemporary Asian
Artists from the Logan Collection,
San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, California
266
Painting for Joy: New Japanese
Painting in 1990s, The Japan
Foundation Forum, Tokyo
Someti me Wa r m a nd F uzzy/
Children a nd Contemporary
A rt, Des Moi nes A rt Center,
Iowa [Touring exhibition in the
United States, Canada, and Spain
until 2002: Tacoma Art Museum,
Washington; Scottsdale Museum
of Contemporary Art, Arizona;
P.S.1 Center for Contemporary
Art, New York; Fundacio La Caixa,
Barcelona, Spain; Crocker Art
Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada]
Forget About the Ball and Get
on with the Play: The Image of
the Child in Contemporary Art,
Kunsthalle Nrnberg, Germany
2000 of Art, Alabama; Independent
Trading Views, Stadtgalerie
Saarbrcken, Germany [Touring
Exhibition in Germany and The
Netherlands: Stdtische Galerie
Erlangen, Germany; Stedelijk
Museu m De La ken hal, Lieden,
The Netherlands]
Super Flat, Parco Gallery, Tokyo
Continental Shift, Ludwig Forum
fr Internationale Kunst, Aachen,
Germany
Dark Mirrors of Japan, de Appel
Center for Contemporary Art,
A msterda m, The Netherla nds
dArt Contemporain, Bordeaux,
France
The Darker Side of Playland,
Art, California
GENDAI: Japanese Contemporary
ArtBetween the Body and Space,
Centre for Contemporary Art,
Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland
2001 Salzburg, Germany]
Super Flat, The Mu seu m of BABEL 2002, National Museum of
Contemporary Art and MOCA Gallery
at the Pacific Design Center,
Los Angels, California [Touring
Exhibition in the United States:
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
Min nesota; Hen ry Art Gallery,
University of Washington, Seattle]
My Reality Contemporary Art
and the Culture of Japanese
A nimation, Des Moines Art
Center, Iowa [Touring Exhibition
in the United States: Brooklyn
Museum, New York; Contemporary
Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio;
Tampa Museum of Art, Florida;
Chicago Culture Center, Illinois;
Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Norton
Museum of Art, West Palm Beach,
Florida; Museum of Glass, Tacoma,
Curators International, New York]
Public Offerings: Works by
Twenty-five Young Artists Shaping
International Contemporary Art,
The Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, California
JAM: Tokyo London, Barbican Art
Gallery, London [2002, Tokyo Opera
City Art Gallery]
Senritsu Mirai/Future Perfect prefecture, Japan
Present Day A rt From Japa n,
Centro per lArte Contemporanea
Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy
Silence of the City, Gwangju Art
Museum, Korea
Neo Tokyo: Japanese Art Now,
The Museu m of Contemporary Art,
Sydney, Australia
2002 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,
The Museu m of Modern Art (MoMA
QNS), Queens, New York
The Japa nese Ex perience
Inevitable, Ursula Blickle
Stiftu n g, Kraichtal, Ger ma n y
[2003, Das Museu m der Moder ne
2006
Temporary Art Museum Soi Sabai,
Contemporary A rt Korea, Seoul Bangkok, Thailand
Contemporary Art from Japan to Long Live Sculpture! Middelheim
Finland 2002, Kerava Art Museum, Open-Air Sculptu re Museu m,
Helsinki, Finland Belgium
Shanghai Biennale, China
2003
M_ARS-ART AND WAR, Neue Galerie 2007
Graz, Austria The Door into Su m mer: The Age
Pai nti n g i n Ou r Ti me, The of Micropop, Contemporary Art
Niigata Bandaijima Art Museu m, Center ART TOWER MITO, Ibara ki
Niigata prefecture, Japan prefecture, Japan
Nios, Centro de Arte de Pretty Baby, Modern Art Museum
Salamanca, Spain of Fort Worth, Texas
I bambini siamo noi, Galleria
Civica di A rte Contempora nea, 2008
Trento, Italy KITA!!: Japanese Artists Meet
Comic Release: Negotiati n g Indonesia, Cemeti Art House,
Identity for a New Generation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
The Contemporary A rts Center,
New Orleans, Louisiana 2009
Happiness, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of
Your Dog, Orange County Museum Contemporary Art, Queensland Art
of Art, Newport Beach, California Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
Aichi Triennale Pre-event, In the
2004 Little Playground: Hitsuda Nobuya
Ti me of M y Li fe: A rt with and His Surrounding Students,
Youthful Spirit, Tokyo Opera City Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art,
Art Gallery Aichi prefecture, Japan and Nagoya
Non-sect Radical, Yokohama City Art Museum, Nagoya, Aichi
Mu seu m of A rt, Ka nagawa prefecture, Japan
Fiction Love, The Museu m of
Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan
Funny Cuts: Cartoons und Comics
i n der zeitgenosischen Ku n st,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany
2005
The Elegance of Silence:
Contemporary Art from East Asia,
Little Boy: The Arts of Japans
Exploding Subculture, Japan
Society Gallery, New York
YOKOHAMA 2005: International
Triennale of Contemporary Art,
Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture,
Japan
267
Selected Bibliography
A to Z: Yoshitomo Nara + graf.
Tokyo: Foil, 2006. Available in
Japanese only.
Bessatsu toppu ranna: Nara
Yoshitomonaivu wanda warudo
[Top Runner Separate Volume:
Yoshitomo NaraA Naive Wonder
World]. Tokyo: KTC Chuo Shuppan,
2001. Available in Japanese with
partial English translation.
Chambers, Kristin, ed. Yoshitomo
Nara: Nothing Ever Happens.
Cleveland: Museum of Contemporary
Art, 2003.
Coatzee, Mark. Not Afraid:
Rubell Family Collection.
New York: Phaidon Press, 2004.
The Darker Side of Playland:
Childhood Imagery from the
Logan Collection. San Francisco:
San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 2000.
Goto Shiego, ed. Ukiyo: Yoshitomo
Nara. Photographs by Takashi
Homma. Tokyo: Little More, 1999.
Hoptman, Laura. Drawing Now:
Eight Propositions. New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
Hunt, David. Yoshitomo Nara:
The Prince & The Pauper.
Art Asia Pacific, no. 39 (winter
2004): 4447.
I Dont Mind, If You Forget Me:
Nara Yoshitomo. Yokoha ma a nd
Tokyo: Yokohama Museum of Art in
collaboration with Tankosha, 2001.
Available in Japanese only.
Ironic Fantasy: Another World by
Five Contemporary Artists. Miyagi:
The Miyagi Museum of Art, 1996.
268
Konishi, Nobuyuki. Yoshitomo Nara.
Saarbrken, Germany: Stadtgalerie
Saarbrken, 2000.
Matsui, Midori. A to Z. Artforum
(December 2006): 32728.
Matsui, Midori. The Age of
Micropop: The New Generation of
Japanese Artists. Tokyo: Parco
Publishing, 2007.
Matsui, Midori. Hira kareta
seishin no utsuwahankaigateki
doroingu no shiron [A Vehicle
for an Open Psyche: Toward the
Theory of Anti-painterly Drawing],
Bijutsu techo (April 2000): 6371.
Available in Japanese only.
Murakami, Takashi, ed. Little Boy:
The Arts of Japans Exploding
Subculture. New York, New Haven,
and London: Japan Society and
Yale University Press, 2005.
Murakami, Takashi, ed. Superflat.
Tokyo: Madra Publishing, 2000.
Na ra, Yoshitomo. F ukai fukai
mizutamari/In the Deepest Puddle:
Yoshitomo Nara. Tokyo: Kadokawa
Shoten, 1997. Available i n
Japanese only.
Nara, Yoshitomo. The Good, the Bad,
the Average...and Unique: Yoshitomo
Nara. Tokyo: Little More, 2003.
Nara, Yoshitomo. The Little Star
Dweller: Chiisana hoshi tsushin.
Tokyo: Rockin On, 2004. Available
in Japanese only.
Nara, Yoshitomo. The Lonesome
Puppy. San Francisco: Ch ronicle
Books, 2008. Originally published
in Japanese in 1999 by Magazine
House, Tokyo; English translation
by Chronicle Books.
Nara, Yoshitomo. Nara Note. Tokyo:
Chikuma Shobo, 2001. Available in
Japanese only.
Nara Yoshitomo, Murakami Takashi
w a sekai gengoda! [Yoshitomo
Nara a nd Ta kashi Mu ra ka mi are
the Global La n g uage!]. Brutus
(September 2001). Available i n
Japanese only.
Nara, Yoshitomo. Slash with a
Knife: Yoshitomo Nara. Tokyo:
Little More, 1998; 1st printing.
Tokyo: Foil, 2005; 2nd printing.
Available in Japanese only.
Nobody Knows: Yoshitomo Nara
Drawings. Tokyo: Little More,
2001; 1st printing. Tokyo: Foil,
2005; 2nd printing.
Pricco, Evan. Yoshitomo Nara.
Juxtapoz, no. 104 (September 2009).
Rothenberger, Ma n fred, ed.
Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby
Supermarket. Nrnberg, Germany:
Institut fr moderne Kunst
Nrnberg in collaboration with
Michael Zink Gallery, Munich, 2001.
Sanders, Mark, Fumiya Sawa,
and Kyoichi Tsuzu ki, eds.
Reflex: Contemporary Japanese
Self-Portraiture. London:
Trolley Limited, 2003.
Schwabsky, Barry. Vitamin P:
New Perspectives in Painting.
New York: Phaidon Press, 2002.
Smith, Roberta. Japans Collective
Uncon scious. New York Times,
April 8, 2005, pp. B2731.
Special IssueNo War: Yoshitomo
Nara, Ri n ko Kawauchi. Foil 1
(January 2003).
This is a time of...S.M.L. Tokyo: Yoshitomo Nara: From the Depth of
Seigensha Art Publishing, 2004. My Drawer. Tokyo: Foil, 2005.
Tokushu: Murakami Takashi VS Yoshitomo Nara: From the Depth of
Nara Yoshitomo [Special Issue: My Drawer. Seoul: Leeum, Samsung
Takashi Murakami VS. Yoshitomo Museum of Art, 2005.
Nara]. Eureka (October 2001).
Available in Japanese only. Yoshitomo Nara: From the Depth of
My Drawer Yoshii Brick Brewhouse,
Tokushu: Nara Yoshitomoaratana Hirosaki. Hirosaki: Yoshitomo Nara
tabi no hajimari [Special Issue: Ex hibition Hirosa ki Com mittee,
Yoshitomo NaraThe Beginning of a 2005. Available in Japanese only.
New Journey]. Bijutsu techo (July
2000). Available in Japanese only. Yoshitomo Nara Hiroshi Sugito:
Over the Rainbow. Ostfildern,
Tok u shu: Na ra Yoshitomo Germany: Hajte Cantz, 2005.
[Special Issue: Yoshitomo Nara],
Asahi Graph (May 2000). Available Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade.
in Japanese only. Kanazawa: 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2007.
Wada, Kyoko, ed. Birth and
Present: A Studio Portrait of Yoshitomo Nara + graf: Torre de
Yoshitomo Nara. Photographs by Mlaga. Mlaga, Spain: Centro de
Mie Morimoto. Corte Madera, Arte Contemporneo de Mlaga, 2007.
Calif.: Gingko Press, 2003.
Who Snatched the Babies? Yoshitomo
Nara. Paris and Tokyo: Impression
Jouve Paris a nd Tomio Koya ma
Gallery, 2002.
Yoshimoto, Banana. Argentine Hag.
Drawi n gs a nd photograph s by
Yoshitomo Nara. Tokyo: Rockin On,
2002.
Yoshimoto, Banana. Hardboiled and
Hard Luck. Drawings by Yoshitomo
Nara. Origi nally published i n
Japa nese i n 1999 by Rocki n On,
Tokyo; En glish tra n slation by
Michael Em merich, New York:
Grove Press, 2005.
Yoshi moto, Ba na na. Hinagik u no
jinsei [The Life of Hi nagi k u].
Drawings by Yoshitomo Nara. Tokyo:
Rocki n On, 2000. Available i n
Japanese only.
269
Contributors
Melissa Chiu is museum director
and vice president, Global Art
Progra ms at Asia Society i n
New York, where she has worked
since 2001. Previously, she was
founding director of the Asia-
Australia Arts Centre in Sydney,
Australia (19962001). As a leading
authority on Asian contemporary
art, she has authored numerous
publication s a nd or ga n ized
nearly thirty ex hibitions of
international art.
Miwako Tezuka is associate curator
at Asia Society in New York. She
is a specialist of contemporary
Japa nese a rt. In 2003 Tezu ka
cofounded PoNJA-GenKon (Post-1945
Japanese Art Discussion Group),
a global on li ne net work of
specialists i n the field of
contemporary Japanese art. Since
2006 she is also a US-based
member of Oral History Archives
of Japa nese A rt, a n a rchive
project initiated by a consortium
of Japa nese a rt schola rs a nd
art professionals.
Michael Wilson is an independent
critic, editor, and curator based
i n New York. He has contributed
to jou r nals i ncludi n g Artforum,
frieze, Modern Painters, a nd
Art Monthly, a nd to ex hibition
catalog ues published by P.S.1
Contempora r y A rt Center, the
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Art
in General, and Matthew Marks
Gallery. A graduate of the Royal
College of Art, London, he has
organized exhibitions in the U.K.
and the U.S. including How to
Read a Book at Locust Projects,
Miami (2010).
270
Hideki Toyoshima is the founder
of gm projects and an independent
stage designer, and ex hibition
desig ner a nd cu rator. In 1993,
he and his six friends established
graf, a creative unit that designs
livi n g, encompassi n g m u sic,
fashion, food, and art, in Osaka,
Japan. He also founded graf media
gm as a department of graf that
speci fically focu ses on a r t
before he left the u nit i n 2009.
He has worked collaboratively
with a nu mber of artists a nd
cu rrently lives a nd works i n
Kanagawa prefecture.
Midori Matsui is one of Japans
leadi n g contem pora r y a r t
critics. A prolific commentator
on contemporary Japanese art,
Matsuis articles appear regularly
i n a rt jou r nals, ma gazi nes,
a nd i nter national ex hibition
catalogues, and her major books
include Art after the End of Art
(2002) and Micropop (2007).
Photography Credits
Un less other wise noted, all
images are Yoshitomo Nara and
are provided courtesy of Yoshitomo
Nara. The following images are
Yoshitomo Nara and are provided
courtesy of Yoshitomo Nara as well
as the following sources:
Front cover, figs. 1, 5a, b, 6,
11, 13, 29, pages 34, 39, 40, 45,
47, 66, 7071, 8385, 87, 128,
138, 14041, 14850, 190, 199,
207, 214 (top), 215, 216 (bottom),
217 (bottom), 22024: Courtesy
of Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo,
Yoshitomo Nara; frontispiece,
figs. 16a, b, 26a-c, 40a, b,
42a, b, 43, 24849, 25253: Hako
Hosokawa; fig. 2, pages 57, 18485,
191 (top): Courtesy of Hakutosha,
Nagoya and Tomio Koyama Gallery,
Tokyo; figs. 3, 23, 25, pages 29,
32 (top), 33, 3738, 4244, 4849,
5153, 56 (top, middle), 58, 122,
124, 126 (right), 127 (right),
12931, 188, 191 (bottom), 192,
198: Collection of the Aomori
Mu seu m of A rt; figs. 24, 28,
pages 26, 41, 50, 5455, 56
(bottom), 59, 61, 6869, 77,
11519, 13437, 18687, 189,
19697, 2005: Digital Image
The Mu seu m of Moder n A rt/
Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource,
NY; fig. 10a, b: Sheldan Collins;
fig. 18, pages 163, 167: Rene
Martin and Heather Rasmussen;
fig. 19, pages 15253, 25051: Jos
Luis Gutirrez, Mlaga; fig. 39a,
b: Masako Nagano; fig. 41a, b:
Cou rtesy 21st Centu ry Museu m
of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa;
page 80: Galerie Zin k, M nchen/
Berlin; page 113: Courtesy of
Aichi Prefectural Museu m of Art,
1986 Yoshitomo Nara; page 123:
Bria n Wilcox; pages 139, 169,
22527: R. H. Hen sleig h; page
145: Image Sothebys, New York;
page 160: Rene Martin; pages 216
(top), 217 (top): Courtesy of Tomio
Koyama Gallery,TokyoandGalerie
Zink,Berlin, Yoshitomo Nara;
pages 246, 25455: Cou rtesy
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
The following images are provided
courtesy of the following sources:
fig. 7: Joshua W hite; fig. 8:
Courtesy of Gavin Browns Enterprise;
fig. 9: From Rokabiri ga ka
(Rockabilly Pai nter), Shukan
Sankei, April 27, 1958; fig. 15:
Evening Standard/Stringer/Hulton
Archives/Getty Images; fig. 17b:
Asia Society Museu m; fig. 30:
Photo by J. R. Eyerman//Time Life
Pictures/Getty Images; fig. 31:
Courtesy Keane Eyes Gallery, San
Francisco, CA; fig. 32: Courtesy
303 Gallery, New York; fig. 33:
Oren Slor; fig. 34: Cou rtesy
of Mike Kelley studio; fig. 35:
John Faier; fig. 36: Courtesy of
the artist and Nicole Klagsbrun
Gallery; fig. 37: Cou rtesy of
Deitch Projects; fig. 38a, b:
Greg Kessler; page 257: Courtesy
New Music Magazine
overleaf
Today, 2003
Colored pencil on paper
H. 12 12 x W. 8 78 in. (31.7 x 22.6 cm)
Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
271
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