How Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara embraced his inner child, community healing and imperfection in a world of chaos

“But I don’t create works consciously to address a particular social issue,” he explains to Tatler. “For scholars and writers who are looking at my practice as an outsider, they’re objective and they look for a context to explain my work. Sometimes I agree with their interpretations; sometimes I don’t. I live and breathe in the social context, so I don’t need to make out or overthink that social context in my practice. I do it intuitively. If I didn’t, it would be the end of my career.”

In the past couple of years, he has shifted his focus from honing his clay art technique to exploring his inner psyche and began to ponder his connection with the material as an artist and with his cultural roots, growing up in northern Japan, which is known for its natural landscape.

Instead of delicately sculpted round cheeks, the recent sculptures, 11 of which appear in the LA show, feature eyes made out of poked holes, scratched indentations and disproportionate facial features that instil a feeling of rawness and oddity, reminding viewers of how a child might play with clay. Nara enlarged these palm-size clay pieces and cast them in bronze; they showcase the artist’s exploration of mischance and imperfections.

Nara has come a long way from being neglected in art markets that were more attuned to creating “perfect” artworks, to making “imperfect” art pieces that reflect his emotional transformation and challenge conventional notions of artmaking. Instead of striving to fit in, the artist stayed true to his own personal style and didn’t care much about making money or building a reputation. “I never knocked at the doors from one gallery to another to submit my portfolio to beg for a show,” he says. “And I never create artworks for shows at any galleries. I create art in the way I feel, and I exhibit them only when the occasion is right.” 

Nara first started drawing and doodling as a child. Both his parents were usually at work and his siblings, who were almost a decade older, didn’t spend much time with him. In his mid-teens, he started hanging out with students from a nearby university, who taught him about literature and films. He liked their liberal mindset and lifestyle so on their advice, went to art school—Musashino Art University in Tokyo from 1979 to 1981, then Aichi University of the Arts in Nagakute from 1981 to 1987.

After graduating, he set his eyes on Europe. In 1988, he enrolled at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a fine arts academy in the German city, without knowing a word of German. This language barrier plunged him back into the solitude that he hadn’t experienced since childhood. It was here that he started creating the paintings and drawings of wide-eyed children as an emotional outlet–for example, There Is No Place Like Home, a 1995 painting that captures the complexity of belonging. He
got a part-time job at a Japanese restaurant to support himself and would draw and paint in his spare time every day.

“No one would take me seriously in the early 1990s,” he says. But this was a blessing in disguise: “I was really able to focus on my practice, as no one would pick up my work.” That was, until Michael Zink, founder of Galerie Zink, approached him to do a show in Cologne, six years after Nara’s move to Düsseldorf. It was well-received; from there, he began capturing the attention of the international art world, with exhibitions held in the Netherlands and back in his home country.

America also came calling: he spent time on the West Coast, which would eventually influence his art. In 1995, Blum became the first US gallery to showcase his works, and in the following year, he was invited by American artist Paul McCarthy to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The West Coast has an affinity with a lot of Asian pop culture, culture, history—and the hippie movement. The people who were attracted to me were those interested in sub-subcultures, instead of high art or European art history, which are more along the lines of East Coast tradition,” he says. “So if I were selected by a New York gallery back then [and not a Los Angeles institution], my work would have been very different.”

Nara’s larger prints and paintings since 2010 have sold for astronomical prices; a report by modern and contemporary print platform My Art Broker in 2023 suggests that 79 of his artworks have sold for over US$1 million. In 2019, Knife Behind Back (2000) sold for an astounding HK$195,696,000 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. Not that he courts fame and fortune. In fact, he avoids crowds and unsolicited attention, preferring to steer clear of spending time in Tokyo and work in smaller towns or the countryside instead, finding the quieter life is more conducive to his work.

Despite the demand for his work, he creates art at his own pace. Over the past four years or so, he has only produced two paintings; he has been spending time travelling and visiting refugee camps in places like Afghanistan and Syria. “Only 30 per cent of my life is about art. The rest has nothing to do with it, but people focus so much on my art that they didn’t realise this part of me,” he says. “I didn’t want to be an artist so much as an anthropologist, who can learn about the history, the land and its communities.”

That is not to say he’s changing careers just yet—in fact, this month, he has two exhibitions taking place currently at London’s Hayward Gallery and Taipei’s Meta Space. It just means he has a different perspective on art.“A lot of artists are really conscious about making a name in the art world, which makes the conversations pretty narrow,” he says. “But there’s a much broader life to live beyond making it inside the art world. My real goal in life is to live freely as an artist.”

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