ART-PRESENTATION: Yoshitomo Nara

Yoshitomo Nara is among the most beloved Japanese artists of his generation. His widely recognizable portraits of menacing figures reflect the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self. A peripatetic traveler, Nara’s oeuvre takes inspiration from a wide range of resources: memories of his childhood, music, literature, studying and living in Germany (1988–2000), exploring his roots in Japan, Sakhalin, and Asia, and modern art from Europe and Japan. Spanning over 30 years Yoshitomo Nara views the artist’s work through the lens of his longtime passion, music.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

In April of last year, Yoshitomo Nara took to Twitter to express his thanks for Taiwan’s donations of face masks to Japan an act of gratitude which caught the attention of President Tsai Ing-wen, whose tweeted response to the artist marked the start of the project to bring Nara’s first solo exhibition in Taiwan. Taking place on the 10th anniversary of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Nara’s landmark exhibition is one part in a series of programming put together by the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association and the General Association of Chinese Culture, to celebrate the friendship between Taiwan and Japan. The exhibition will include Nara’s new painting “Miss Moonlight” (2020), which is exhibited outside of Japan for the first time following its debut in the exhibition “STARS: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World” at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo in 2020. Yoshitomo Nara grew up in Hirosaki, in Japan’s rural northern prefecture of Aomori. Having graduated with an MFA from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Nagakute, Japan, in 1987, he completed his studies at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, Germany in 1988. Nara began his career during the decade he spent in Cologne, and from the mid-1990s he exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, Japan, and all over Asia. His return to Japan in 2000 coincided with a surge of global interest in Japanese pop culture, particularly in the United States. While he is primarily a painter, his practice encompasses drawing; sculptures made of wood, FRP, ceramic, and bronze; installations that incorporate scrap materials; and photographs that document everyday landscapes and the encounters he has during his travels. When he returned to Japan, he had his first solo exhibition “I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me”, where he focused on an exploration of his inner psyche, embarking on a conversation with his childhood self through time and space. What we need now in Taipei, a full ten years after the Tohoku Earthquake, is to cooperate and rebuild. The emphasis is, therefore, on “the desire to connect”. Twenty years after Nara’s return to Japan, the sentiment has perhaps evolved into “I Don’t Forget, If You Mind Me”, which symbolizes the message that Taiwan-Japan relations convey: interconnection. A vital component within Nara’s acrylic work is his use of expressions, which can be considered as a modern extension of portrait paintings. For his current exhibit at the Kuandu Museum of Arts in Taipei, he focus on front-facing portraits: from his early work “Girl in Blue” (1993), when he used an outlining technique to paint his subjects; to “Wisdom Tooth Fever” (1999) or “Eastern Youth” (2000), where he began to use what he refer to as “knife-eyes” (heart-shaped eyes). Later on, we see less and less of these “knife-eyes”, as the eyes of his portrait subjects began to close, or take on larger, rounded shapes. With “Twins I & II” in 2005, Nara delves deeper into the details of the eyes, and in “Cosmic Eyes (In the Milky Lake)” of the same year, he was already experimenting with different techniques on each eye.

Photo: Yoshitomo Nara, There Is No Place Like Home, 1995, Acrylic on canvas, 16 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches, © Yoshitomo Nara, Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe Gallery

Info: Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, No.1, Syueyuan Rd., Beitou Dist., Taipei City,  112, Taiwan, Duration: 12/3-20/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://kdmofa.tnua.edu.tw