An Introduction to Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara was born in 1959 in Hirosaki, Japan, and trained as an artist in Japan from 1979 to 1987 and in Germany from 1988 to 1993. However, he pushed back against his formal training, rejecting elite, intellectual conventions, seeking instead to eliminate the “aloofness of high art” from his work. This places Nara in the Neo Pop style that arose in the 1990s as a “second coming” of the original Pop Art movement, an American rejection of academicism in the 1950s.[1] Rather than an intellectual or philosophical engagement with his artwork, Nara mass-produces images in many forms to make them easily accessible and encourages a “naked emotional response” before his work. To make himself even more accessible as an artist, Nara publishes a blog called “Nara Voice,” which he uses as a platform on which he can be candid and open with his followers.[2]
Nara is perhaps the second most renowned contemporary Japanese artist, after Takashi Murakami. While the two are friends and have collaborated, their styles are noticeably different. Superflat arose with the “Superflat” exhibition of 2000, which was accompanied by the “Superflat Manifesto.” This new style explored a “digitally constituted world,” a flattening that allowed for the coexistence of multiple perspectives and planes, and also flattened in a figurative way by removing the distinctions between popular culture and “high culture”.[3]
While Murakami’s Superflat movement has had some influence on his work, Nara's work breaks with this aesthetic in its painterliness and freehand lines.[4] Nara loved the nostalgic, “evident superficiality” of old Hollywood movies’ special effects, which invited the viewer to look more closely, rather than inhibiting the imagination, as Nara feels that contemporary technology does.[5] Many of his finished works are drawings or incorporate drawing, rather than relegating drawing to preliminary sketches. This embrace of the non-digital and the handcrafted is combined with simple compositions featuring solitary figures in unformed backgrounds, rather than the busy combinations of planes and surfaces in Murakami’s works.[6]
Nara draws inspiration from numerous sources from past and contemporary culture. He has great respect for doga, a Japanese style of children’s book illustrations that appeals to an adult audience as well by providing social commentary and layered meaning for an adult viewer to unpack.[7] He was also greatly influenced by punk culture, which he discovered as a teen, when he sought out music from smaller labels and began collecting records. Nara’s friends all note the constant sound of music in his studio. Punk culture declared a loyalty to freedom of expression, even if some critics have scoffed at this loyalty as an immature frustration.[8] References to punk in his artworks, including guitars or lyrics, bring the punk spirit into the composition, suggesting “possible liberation” from the authorities imposed by contemporary society.[9] It is perhaps these undertones of rebellion that drew Nara’s original fans to his artwork. His first supporters outside the professional art world were those who felt alienated from society, including youths having trouble with their families or at school. In Nara’s paintings, viewers found “spiritual solace,” and somehow saw themselves represented and reflected in the images.[10]