Yoshitomo Nara

If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, then the intensely staring, delinquent characters created by Yoshimoto Nara have a lot going on inside. As one of the best-known (and best-selling) Japanese artists of our time, Nara has earned this massive retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. It's his largest ever UK exhibition by far: spanning not only his paintings, but also drawings, installations, and sculpture across a four-decades-long career.
On entering, you're confronted with a rickety wooden house, complete with a patchwork corrugated iron roof and glass windows revealing a homey room scattered with drawings. Rock music whirs from the TV and empty beer cans litter one corner: this feels like a place of peace, a sanctuary where Nara's interests and comforts intersect. Here, we're introduced to his punkish tendencies – not only in his musical tastes (in some works, he plays up to his inner fangirl, scribbling 'thank you for Ramones' around a rough coloured-in cartoon), but also in attitude. This is an artist that is all about playing with innocence – like sticking cigarettes in children's mouths – and protest, scrawling slogans about ending nukes in capital letters and adding pacifist symbolism to clothing.
Nara is known for his kawaii, manga-esque figures which might look lost and sad as much as naughty and demonic. Some are loud, brash: like his collection of solid-lined paint marker drawings on paper. Others, like After the Acid Rain, 2006, appear innocent until you read the name. You realise those wide eyes are not glittering to look pretty: they're desperate, helpless.
It's usually his drawings which are spikier, more political, but his quieter, more nuanced painting is the most impressive. Midnight Tears, 2023, is a show stopper: all rainbow-like dappled hair and glistening, jewel-like eyes, it's iridescent in its layering of colour and paint, as though you're seeing it through a light fog in its softness of brush.
What works well about this exhibition is that it really lets the work speak for itself: extra context is only given on every other label, and it's arranged via loose themes, allowing you to make subtle connections and trace the growth in Nara's practice. It's perhaps most obvious in his sculptural work: Pray, 1991, a cat-like figure made from rough papier-mâché and acrylic, is rough and heavy, as though it's been bandaged up in a rush. The sublimely smooth lacquered heads in Fountain of Life, stacked up on top of a teacup and gently weeping real water, could be a different artist entirely – if it weren't for the tell-tale downcast eyes and childlike softness.
At points, it can all start to feel like you're seeing the same thing again and again. But it's the subtleties which make it worthwhile. Nara's play with western pop culture and darker themes alluding to climate change and nuclear war, all packaged up into a sugary-sweet package, is a real joy to look at. But it's his painterly skill, when seen up close, which is the real treat.

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