Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Yoshitomo Nara: I Don't Mind, If You Forget Me

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Yoshitomo Nara: I Don't Mind, If You Forget Me

by John McGee

Yoshitomo Nara, Fountain of Life, 2001
(Images courtesy the artist and Yokohama Museum of Art) 

“Oh! My God! I miss you.” The cute, pissed-off little girl casts a dagger-eyed glance over her shoulder as she walks away. Are the words—printed in block letters above her oversized head—her own ambivalent thoughts or a voice from heaven? Though the figure-and-text drawing suggests manga, mixed emotions and a lack of context frustrate any easy narrative.

That’s normal for Yoshitomo Nara’s work. His alternately cuddly and menacing, dreamy-eyed and sour-pussed progeny—usually isolated against monochrome backgrounds with just their attitude and maybe a cigarette or head bandage for company—speak of youthful loneliness, ennui and the struggle for self-identity. This show of new work, organized by Yokohama Museum curator Taro Amano, explores Nara’s bi-polar babes and mystical mutts through drawings, paintings, fountains and sculptural curiosities. 

Nara, 41, chose to display the wellspring of his work—his sketches—outside the main galleries in a small, shed-like room made of worn plywood used for casting concrete forms. Following this metaphor, the pivotal drawings in “Time of My Life” are the building blocks, the DNA, of what’s inside the pristine gallery walls. Among the collage of sketches inscribed on loose-leaf note pages and backs-of-envelopes, a torn slip of paper contains the cipher to his characters’ roots. This rough family tree traces the children’s lineage to postwar 1950s and ’60s consumer-goods characters like Sony Boy, Denon’s Astro Girl, Hoover Housewife Suzy Smart and Mrs. S.O.S. His dogs are a crossbreed of Tillit the Tillamook cow and RCA’s Nipper. 

But the true paternity, Nara’s, is easy to spot as the artist talks through a friendly, mischievous grin. “Drawing is like a diary,” he says, “...my private things.” Paintings and sculptures, on the other hand, are public and require greater thought, preparation and control, says the artist. 

Raw, personal diaries are usually more exciting than slickly packaged biography, and that’s true of this show as well. The painted characters still pop out of holes or waggle long-sleeved arms, but the images are bigger, tighter, more monumental. Figures on large, saucer-shaped, concave canvases are more like community memorial plaques than keepsake mementos. 

Yoshitomo Nara, Time of My Life, 
1988-2001 

The fountains are beguiling; the sculptures, odd. In Fountain of Life, tears stream down the cherubic white cheeks of angelic baby heads, stacked like frozen drops of holy milk in an oversized teacup. In Fountain of Sorrow, five small dogs face each other over a hole, crying. The recirculating water, a never-ending reincarnation of spirits and feelings, says the artist, is neither sad nor joyful, but like miracle weeping—Virgin Mary statues, beyond simple explanation.

The title piece—spelled out in clear Plexiglas box letters crammed with Nara-design stuffed animals mounted above shelves of vintage donated dolls—may not be one of his best sculptures, but shows Nara is a gracious father. He says he knows that, once they leave his hands, his offspring have their own lives and dreams. “I don’t mind, if you forget me” is not indifference, but bittersweet recognition of the characters' autonomy. 

A dozen paintings from 1988-1999—a cross-section of his characters’ evolution—is on display in the permanent collection galleries. 

This exhibition was held Sep-Oct 2001 at the Yokohama Museum of Art in Yokohama, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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