Yoshitomo Nara @ Hayward Gallery

Oisín McGilloway
Aug 12
5 min read

Until the end of August, Hayward Gallery is taking visitors inside the mind of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Showing off his famous “big-eyed girls” as well as the many sculptures and paintings that illustrate their backstory, Europe’s largest retrospective of this celebrated artist is a shockingly intimate affair. As a country, Japan has been at the centre of a lot of global political events in modern history; Nara’s exhibition, wedding soft pastels and textures with hard political trauma, is one native’s perspective.

Nara was born in 1959 in the Aomori Prefecture in the north-east of Honshu, where he grew up surrounded by Western culture, particularly music. This is immediately apparent on entering the exhibition: the curators at Hayward have taken full advantage of the space by placing My Drawing Room (2008), a full-sized, fully furnished hut fit with posters, doodles and empty beer cans. This strikingly large piece, dwarfed by the expanse of the open-plan gallery, is an early entry into the emotional structure that Nara and Hayward Gallery aim to build.

It is immediately apparent that the hut represents Nara’s safeplace—a “place like home” as is written on one side of the hut—which seems here to be his emotional interior. There are doodles, photos of times gone by, and even a photo of a better-constructed hut, which we can crudely compare to the looming body standards we’re all aware of. Towering over the hut on an opposite wall is a mosaic of American folk and rock albums, some of which can be heard faintly playing inside the hut. This theme of an interior safe space, but one that is influenced by the world around it, resonates throughout the exhibition, particularly later on around questions of protest and war.

From the main floor we move up to the mezzanine, where the calm, muffled sound of American folk just about keeps up. We get a sense that the “big-eyed girls” we see on this level can also hear the music; the subject of No Means No (2006), an expressionless girl with long red hair standing in front of a beige background, is looking down over the railing at the hut. The colourful twinkles in her eyes are the only evidence of life in the painting, a feature repeated in similar paintings in the eyes as well as the hair. Something inside her, behind the dull expression, is shining, just as it did in Nara’s own mind when he conjured up the image of the girl (the facial proportions make the presence of a muse unlikely).

However, as we move through the exhibition, through variously amusing, and yet always innocent paintings and doodles, the sparkle born from the dulcet tones of the American folk begins to resemble something else. After all, Nara’s early exposure to American music came from Far East Network, a radio channel operated by the US military during the island hopping campaigns in the Second World War. In the next room, where we can no longer hear the music, nor see its source, we see antiwar murals, as well as paintings referring to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the 66-year gap between closed by the nuclearisation of Japan (the atomic bombs becoming nuclear energy, leading to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that the tsunami caused).

In this portion of the exhibition, there is one, tiny painting titled Fire (2009). A girl looking over a horizon at a tiny house on fire, with the same twinkle in her eye as in No Means No, the connection is finally made between the music, instated by the US military, and the remnants of the damage caused by the same military to Japan at the end of WWII. The twinkle in the eye of No Means No is from the music coming from the hut, but is it a sparkle of elation, or the reflection of a blaze?

By this point, it really feels like we’re inside Nara’s psyche, however, by the time we reach the upper-level of the gallery, this is also clear in the sheer amount of his artworks that Hayward is housing. Yes, this all points towards the complexity of emotions and of the mind, particularly as a lot of these appear to be impulsive doodles and so provide the clearest window into Nara’s thoughts, but it is also a lot to take in—perhaps too much. Highlights from this floor, however, are appropriately placed, as they also give us a look at his trauma from an outside perspective. While on the ground floor and mezzanine, sculptures were predominantly made of brass and wood, here there are a lot more made of fibre-reinforced plastic. This ultra-smooth polymer gives the appearance of kawaii, but is artificially manufactured using often harmful chemicals like formaldehyde or even asbestos; where cultural theorists like Sianne Ngai have associated “cuteness” (adjacent to kawaii) to warmth, the material properties of FRP give off a hard coldness that counters it.

It is clear in the sculptures made of FRP that Nara is aware of this; The Fountain of Life (2001), a large, white teacup with bubble-like children’s heads crying melancholically above it, presents a very soft, serene sadness that seems to counter the nihilistic anti-war murals on the lower floors, “inside” Nara’s head. Ngai also points out that the “size” of cuteness, which is always invariably “small” (in its relation to children, or in the literal size of an object), is what causes “cute aggression,” because the object becomes something we want to own, to protect—to commoditise. For a Western audience in the 1940s and in 2011, the nuclear disasters in Japan were merely a mournful news item, and little more. The cold sadness in The Fountain of Life is equally buffered by the warmth of kawaii, making the loss of understanding and empathy the real tragedy in Nara’s FRP sculpture.

Exiting the exhibition, mandatorily into the gift shop, you can find a wonderful Phaidon book on Nara’s work by Yeewan Koon. In the first couple pages, talking about Nara’s artistic career at a glance, Koon describes Nara’s recurring subjects as having ‘childlike expressions [that] resonate with adult emotions, [their] embodiment of kawaii (cuteness) carries a dark humor, and any explicit cultural references are intertwined with personal memories.’ While the attraction of this exhibition might initially be the amusing subjects, the kawaii warmth, or even just to wonder how they got an entire house inside the gallery, you quickly realise that you are being thrust into something much deeper, whether you like it or not. Nevertheless, you’ll leave the exhibition with a feeling of gratitude, that you’ve been able to walk for 45-60 minutes in the shoes of someone from the other side of the world—while also basking in the beauty of Nara’s art, of course.

The Yoshitomo Nara retrospective is at Hayward Gallery until 31st August. For more information and to book tickets, visit their website.