{"id":355023,"date":"2025-08-18T20:34:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/355023\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T20:34:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:34:16","slug":"yoshitomo-nara-is-not-just-being-cute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/355023\/","title":{"rendered":"Yoshitomo Nara Is Not Just Being Cute"},"content":{"rendered":"

The artist has for decades shown how children become contaminated by the adult world\u2019s ills, but a new exhibition hushes the anguish they\u2019re suffering<\/strong><\/p>\n

Viewing the first major survey in London of Yoshitomo Nara\u2019s four-decade career, I\u2019m reminded of the archaic expression \u2018children should be seen and not heard\u2019. Nara is best known for his paintings of mad-eyed kids who hypnotise us through their pained coalescence of cuteness, or kawaii, and psychic trauma, with the former acting as a salve for the latter while the latter bites back. Careful, I suspect, not to upset the Japanese artist\u2019s saleroom superstardom (or the saleability of his merch), the show\u2019s opening wall-text foregrounds the pleasing qualities. While it starts by suggesting that his subjects are \u2018melancholic and uncertain\u2019, they become, \u2018over the years, increasingly serene and meditative\u2019, heralding Nara\u2019s \u2018enduring support for peace, and his deep interest in sharing ideas about home, community, the natural environment\u2019. Never mind that these maniacal kids \u2013 with their rageful, weeping eyes, their bandaged heads and angry slogans \u2013 appear far from alright, contaminated as they seem to be by the adult world\u2019s ills.<\/p>\n

The first work encountered is the installation My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included (2008), a white house patched out of planks and corrugated boards, too small for an adult to stand in, the floor strewn with drawings. Popular music from the 1960s and 70s \u2013 The Beatles, Bob Dylan \u2013 blares from inside, corresponding with several of the 350-odd album sleeves covering the gallery wall nearby. On the outside a painted sign reads \u2018PLACE LIKE HOME\u2019, in which a girl stands with her eyes closed, as if dreaming of elsewhere \u2013 perhaps this rickety cabin of creativity, or the drawings that are made therein. Conjuring a portal between the physical and the imaginary, the installation brings together the unbounded genius of wilful naivety and the upbeat rebellion of prepunk rock. It isn\u2019t as obviously pain-ridden as the rest of Nara\u2019s work, yet there is unease \u2013 as well as cuteness \u2013 in the bandage on the girl\u2019s head and the pile of angsty faces on the floor.<\/p>\n

\"\"Missing in Action, 1999, acrylic on canvas. \u00a9 the artist. Courtesy Sally and Ralph Tawil and Yoshitomo Nara Foundation<\/p>\n

While the layout eschews any strict chronology, we gradually get a sense of Nara\u2019s trajectory from the diminutive, haphazardly placed wall labels, one of his most important formative moments being his encounter with neo-expressionism at Kunstakademie D\u00fcsseldorf, where he studied from 1988 to 1993. In Give You the Flower (1990), a fish-tailed humanoid offers a yellow flower to someone in a dress, their faces almost kissing, though the former is perspiring wildly and the latter grips a knife. Here Nara crudely collides naivety and violence to mine the neuroses that sweetness often seeks to cover up, laying the foundations for his fantastical child-portraits, which he began during the early 1990s. Broadly, these evolved from tightly delineated, more overtly mangalike characters such as the clench-fisted, bloodshot girl in Missing in Action (1999), into the absorbingly layered and soft-edged, galactic-eyed figures \u2013 often on the verge of tears, their faces blown up to fill outsize frames, giving them a totemic presence \u2013 in No Means No (2006) and Midnight Tears (2023).<\/p>\n

Just as ambiguous are the paintings Nara is said to have made in response to the catastrophic leak at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011. The repurposing of planks and boards as a surface on which he painted Emergency (2013) may partly suggest \u2018recovery and repair\u2019. Yet the thrust of the work is its depiction of a weeping girl on a hospital bed spinning out of control \u2013 beyond the foot of the frame, the one visible wheel \u2018swooshing\u2019 \u2013 its sutured, makeshift materiality suggestive of psychic scarring and, indeed, emergency. Although Nara has explained that the disaster deeply affected him, one cannot isolate Fukushima as the only source of his children\u2019s plight. The recycling also recalls Nara\u2019s discovery of neo-expressionism during the 1980s, as well as his signature use of patches of ripped canvas \u2013 as seen in his 2001 painting Too Young to Die, which depicts a child smoking a cigarette, the layered stitching metonymic of accumulative wounding.<\/p>\n

\"\"Power in a Union, 2024, acrylic on wood, 105 x 91 x 6 cm. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

In Dead Flower 2020 Remastered (2020) \u2013 Nara\u2019s enlargement of an earlier painting of his from 1994 \u2013 a knife-brandishing, serrated-toothed child turns to look back at us, proud to have decapitated a flower. One eye is bright yellow, a reflection of the lightbulb dangling above where the flower used to be or, perhaps, a mutation. The image recalls Nara\u2019s watercolour Missing in Action \u2013 Girl Meets Boy (2005), in which one of the child\u2019s eyes bears the imprint of the atomic blast over Hiroshima \u2013 a work curiously omitted in this show, which happens to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the nuclear age. Such curatorial pussyfooting makes the placement of From the Bomb Shelter (2017) and Stop the Bombs (2019) \u2013 the latter painted on planks with the title emblazoned above the child\u2019s head to resemble a protest placard \u2013 at the end of the show, on the bunkerlike ground floor, feel like a tokenistic afterthought. Such manoeuvres seem like an attempt on the part of the gallery (and oddly the artist, who presumably had a say in the matter) to foreground the sweetness of Nara\u2019s subjects while hushing the anguish they\u2019re suffering. While the show risks implementing kawaii\u2019s dissociative tendencies to downplay darker truths, Nara\u2019s work arguably seeks to expose them as well as our predilection for cuteness as a coping mechanism, so it\u2019s fitting that in this final room is I\u2019m sorry (2007). A kid kneels on a box \u2013 a \u2018naughty\u2019 box, perhaps \u2013 with the title written on it, looking up at us in supplication, as if apologising for having spoken out of turn.<\/p>\n

Yoshitomo Nara at Hayward Gallery, London, through 31 August<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Tom Denman<\/a>Reviews<\/a>18 August 2025ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The artist has for decades shown how children become contaminated by the adult world\u2019s ills, but a new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-355023","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115051683300929309","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}