Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist, born in Hirosaki in 1959. I first became aware of his work through a small feature in The Face, four or five years ago. I quickly cut out the illustrations they had printed and blu-tacked them to my wall, where they remained until recently finding a home in my critical diary. Since then he has received attention from the likes of Dazed & Confused, Vice and other magazines, and now has a couple of books available.

My attention was captured, in equal measures, by the style and content of Nara's work. It is hard to really define what the "purpose" or "idea behind" his drawings, paintings and sculptures are; he does not belong to the school of high-concept art that requires an explanatory plaque mounted beside his work, and in interviews seems hesitant to provide a verbal equivalent - something I admire him for. It would be fair, however, to say that his work is focused on childhood. Be it the experience of, or reflection upon, or most likely (in my view) the void that exists between childhood and adulthood. To me his pictures look like the work of a person who never gave up being a kid, but most definitely moved into the scary, complicated world of the adult... something a lot of us can definitely relate to.

The first pictures I saw in The Face were all on the same theme: child-like drawings of kids with big heads, big eyes and tense expressions. One smokes a cigarette. Another mischievously paints the words 'Fuck about everything but I draw again and again!'. Another brandishes a small knife, 'Aggressive Teens' scrawled in red above her head. Little did I know that pretty much Nara's entire body of work is on the same theme, although also encompassing animals and different media. He is the kind of artist whose focus is obsessional. He says he has no choice: "Even if I try to draw something different, it always comes out this way."

Although the artist produces oil paintings, giant sculptures and other forms for his cozy-but-disturbing enfants terribles, I'm still drawn back to those first few images I found years ago, drawn with coloured pencils on battered lined paper, seemingly torn straight from the kind of books we all wrote in at primary school, with smudges, rubber marks and pre-school handwriting. They spoke to me then, and they speak to me now.

"I only draw what I know from experience," says Nara. It's hard to tell at first if these are the works of a disturbed child, or an equally disturbed adult. I'm not sure which category he truly falls into. Whichever, I'm in there with him.

links/bibliography...
bio from the-artists.org
review from assemblylanguage.com  ¶ 11:07 PM