Friendship and Utopia: Nara's Collaborative Works
Nara’s efforts to break away from the norms and restrictions of the world of high art led him to embrace collaborative work in a large part of his artistic production. Collaborative works help return art to the people, and therefore achieving one of Nara’s main goals, the creation of art that is created and shared by the “power of the people.”[1] These works include collaborations with other artists as well as installations involving volunteer participation from.[2]
In 2001, Yoshitomo organized I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me, his homecoming exhibition in Japan after many years spent in Germany, which was also his first exhibition in a public museum in Japan. Ahead of the opening, Nara invited volunteers to create and donate small stuffed imitations of his many characters, which would be used to fill block letters that read “I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME.” Rather than a collection of designs that had been sent to a factory for mass production, this method of production created a community among Nara’s fans. [3] The exhibition created a shared emotional and aesthetic experience for everyone who participated. The community was temporary, due to the impermanent nature of installations, but the shared commitment among participants demonstrated that Nara achieved his vision of art by and for the people.
This sort of large-scale collaboration was realized again in the 2008 show A to Z, created by Nara in collaboration with graf, an architecture and design collective. Held in Nara’s hometown of Hirosaki, Nara created his vision of a utopian artist’s community within the empty Yoshii Brick Brewhouse.[4] Beginning in 2003, over 130,000 volunteers worked together to create a village of rooms or huts, connected by gates, bridges, and pathways. The design process was very organic, without strict direction on the forms that the structures should take.[5]
The structures, of which there were over thirty, housed works by Nara as well as by Kenji Yanobe, Hiroshi Sugito, Atsuhiko Misawa, Tomoko Yoneda, Rinko Kawauchi, Sutee Kunavichayanont, Angkrit Ajchariyasophon, Mai Hofstad Gunnes, James McNew, and Taiyo Matsumoto. Some huts held installations by individual artists, but each structure was connected to those around it, interacting through “open doors, windows, and balconies” to create a sense of community.[6] Such an immense collaborative installation involving both artists and volunteers was an ambitious manifestation of Nara’s vision of shared artistic community.
Nara also collaborated with individual artists to produce jointly created artworks, subverting the conventional importance attributed to individual authorship. In the summer of 2004, Nara and his old student Hiroshi Sugito moved into the Augarten Studio of the Austrian Gallery in Belvedere in Vienna, a shared studio for guest artists. Throughout the summer, the artists discovered how to communicate and produce together, working through the difficulties of having different working methods and formal styles. By the autumn of 2004, the artists had produced about 35 joint paintings as well as dozens of paintings.[7] The artistic production was very diverse in both size and content, featuring small scale and wall-sized works of faces as well as abstract color paintings.[8] The resulting exhibition was titled Over the Rainbow, after a song from The Wizard of Oz, featuring works with titles such as Yellow Brick Road (as in The Wizard of Oz) and No Brain (a reference to the scarecrow of the same story). The exhibition showed a successful hybridization of styles. Nara’s signature child subjects appear repeatedly, but Sugito’s abstract use of color and abstraction of space in landscape also appears throughout. Sometimes, Sugito’s abstraction of space enters into Nara’s figures, as in Andromeda Galaxy Heights, where the head of the girl (presumably Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz) has become a house with bright doors and windows.[9] The blending of styles created show that was a testament to friendship and collaboration. Like The Wizard of Oz, it was a story about friendship, growth, and imagination.