How Yoshitomo Nara’s ‘big-headed girls’ took over the world
By Zoe Sottile, CNN
The big-headed, wide-eyed girls that made Yoshitomo Nara one of the most beloved Japanese artists of the 21st century are everywhere — if you know where to look. You can find them on T-shirts, skateboards, plastered on water bottles as stickers, or blown up and rendered in monumental scale in the artist’s sculptural works. You can even find them, scrawled by the artist himself in confident, graphic lines, on the walls of a Manhattan dive bar he visited in 2009. (On his way back from the impromptu bar decorating, he was arrested for graffitiing on the subway walls and barely made it out in time to his next gallery opening).
Angry, spiteful, mischievous, bored, confused: Nara’s figures are both enigmatic and instantly legible, recognizable both for the artist’s distinct style and their punching emotional effect. Now, Nara’s characters are conquering new territory with a retrospective at David Zwirner Gallery, his first major solo show in New York City in close to a decade. The exhibition, which dovetails with a show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, features new, unseen works along with older pieces. There are both tiny drawings on torn fragments of paper as well as huge, richly painted portraits whose luminescent eyes seem to follow you around the room.
At the Zwirner show’s opening night Thursday, Nara fans queued for close to an hour in a line that extended two blocks, some holding umbrellas to ward off the rain. It was a distinctly young and stylish crowd: There was no shortage of Labubus dangling from bags (the characters’ own huge eyes slightly Nara-esque) and tabi ballet flats. A few subway stops away at Niagara — the East Village bar that Nara graffitied a decade ago — a steady stream of devotees made pilgrimages before or after the opening, a bartender said. There they found a series of graphic drawings, now protected behind plastic, of Nara figures rocking out.
These isolated, defiant figures have become a throughline for the artist’s nearly four-decade career. They are, in Nara’s telling, self-portraits of a sort, ciphers for his own emotions in the aftermath of Japan’s wartime history and multiple environmental disasters. For the waves of young fans who flock to Nara exhibits and emblazon his images on their belongings, they’re a representation of something different: The ennui and turmoil that has defined Gen Z’s coming-of-age in a turbulent world marked by existential threats at every turn.
No matter how they’re perceived, the artworks have made Nara a significant name in the art world, with his work selling for millions, such as “Knife Behind Back,” a huge painting of a frowning girl, one arm tucked behind her back, which went for a whopping $24.94m at an auction in 2019 (a record high for the artist). It’s classic Nara, featuring a figure who is both adorable and slightly menacing, resisting the reduction of herself to something simple and endearing.
The camouflage of cuteness
On the surface, the images with “the big eyes, the round faces,” can be written off as merely cute, according to Mika Yoshitake, an independent curator specializing in postwar and contemporary Japanese art, and curator of the artist’s 2021 LACMA retrospective and forthcoming 2027 exhibition at SFMOMA .
But they “actually refuse the genre” that historically flattens representations of women and girls. You can see that subversion, Yoshitake said, in his characters’ signature haunting eyes, rendered with the subtlety of a master painter. They sometimes have “sidelong glares, very deadpan, sometimes aggressive,” she said. “The cuteness is more like a camouflage for something that’s more guarded.”
Nara grew up the 1960s and 70s in rural northern Japan, during the delicate decades after World War II. The war haunts his work, said Yoshitake: “There’s lots of hidden messages about solitude and bearing the history of the loss that Japan had felt.” Nara’s experiences in Germany, where he studied at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the late 80s, further added to the political dimensions of his work (“Stop the Bombs,” an acrylic painting from 2019 later repurposed as a design for one of his collaborations with fashion designer Stella McCartney, is one example of the more literal political messaging of his art, what Yoshitake calls his “resistance to the system, or to war, or to things that he feels wrong in society”).
His images of lonely children, sometimes bearing surreptitious knives or axes, are “about being tired of injustice, being resilient towards it, and saying, okay, you know what, life isn’t fair, but we will fight back,” said Kevin Lenaerts, the creative director at the Skateroom, which creates highly coveted limited-edition skateboards in collaboration with artists. Their Nara collab was one of their most successful, he said.
Nara’s work has an innate resonance with counterculture, modulated by the rock music that was a lifeline for him as a young boy in rural Japan. He’s “a real punk,” said Lenaerts.
World politics and events have continued to influence Nara’s work. The monumental sculptures on view in DC — the largest is, at 13 feet, as tall as an elephant — were created as a response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. After the catastrophe, which displaced tens of thousands of people, Nara “began playing with clay as a way of being able to reconnect to very simple therapeutic gestures,” said Aaron Seeto, the Hirshhorn’s acting director.
Nara’s work also has an accessibility that extends outside the immediate political context in which it incubated. You don’t have to understand postwar Japan to be instantly drawn in by his beguiling figures, or to feel your own troubled emotions reflected in them.
Nara’s new generation
Nara’s poster-punk aesthetic made his works popular with previous generations of rebels, landing on the album covers of bands like Shonen Knife and R.E.M. His works have also found a new wave of fervent fans among Gen Z. Yoshitake, the curator, attributes the artist’s appeal among younger generations in part to his works’ “graphic legibility.”
At the same time, the emotions of his art “speaks to this generation that is fluent in vulnerability,” she said. And, in a hypercapitalistic world where everything’s a product, his figures retain an authenticity. There’s “this resistance to a type of slickness that some of these more popular branded images have,” said Yoshitake.
“It’s never trend-driven, and that’s why it’s timeless,” she added.
Nara, for all the explication of his figures as self-portraits, also seems to have a particular aptitude for capturing the contradictions of girlhood.
Amanda Quach, a Los Angeles-based fashion and lifestyle content creator whose videos include a roll call of all her Nara merch, said she first discovered Nara’s work at LACMA’s 2021-2022 retrospective. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic , she felt isolated and disaffected. In Nara’s paintings and drawings, she saw younger versions of herself. He has a startling ability, she said, to “capture what it feels like to be a young girl with those complex, frustrating emotions, but looking so cute and innocent at the same time.”
Quach is such a Nara fan that she has two of his works tattooed on her: The smoking girl from “Too Young to Die” on her arm, and a girl rocking out on stage on her leg.
She’s not the only one. Camila Duarte, a New York City-based tattoo artist, said she’s inked over a dozen Nara figures, most of them also on young women. His work reminds her of the feeling of being a child, and particularly of feeling like a child thrust into a dangerous, mystifying world. “There’s so much going on in the world,” she added. “We’re all maybe just feeling a little rebellious too.”
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