Yoshitomo Nara at Boesky

Yoshitomo Nara is a very successful artist by any standard, and wildly popular in Japan. Like Takashi Murakami, with whom Nara is often associated, he is responsible for a range of products from paintings to plush toys (Nara-designed items currently available on eBay include refrigerator magnets, bed linens, ashtrays and T-shirts, as well as limited-edition prints; bids range from $2 to $500). In other words, it is very hard to accept as his the working environment Chelsea White House (2005), a lonely little whitewashed wooden shack that was the centerpiece of this exhibition. It is mostly boarded up, like the refuge of a backwoods survivalist; enhancing the effect of isolation is the surrounding room's primeval darkness, achieved with low lighting and indigo-painted walls.

Running around the sides of the shack is a roughly constructed porch, which can be reached via two short stairways. From the porch, you can stoop under a low doorway to peer down on a humble studio, small and bleak. There are a couple of squashed cans of Heineken on the floor; many more empties have been lined up furtively behind the desk. A kitschy clock in the shape of a cat swings its tail on the wall. In the corner slouches the saddest looking stuffed animal in the world. And tacked with some care to the bare Sheetrock walls are a few dozen drawings, most featuring Nara's trademark figures--winsome big-headed cartoon girls with ghoulish ideas of fun. Lettered crudely on the wall above a work table is the advice, "Stay Out Stay Back."

Elsewhere in the gallery were Crated Room #3, a short stack of wooden crates with sleepwalking figures inside, visible through peepholes, that makes perfunctory reference to current art's nomadism and, on the walls, roughly a dozen framed drawings. There were also two big paintings, each featuring a single little redheaded girl, one on heavy paper, the other on a round, concave support that is the size and shape of a first-generation TV satellite dish. Starry-eyed with incipient tears, the girls are professional emotional extortionists, using industrial-strength sentimentality to make you feel just perceptibly shaky about their obvious irony. It is instructive to compare Nara and others involved with manga imagery to Western artists whose cartoon-based work has also entered the mass market, from Kenny Scharf to Keith Haring. The relative innocence of the American work, its madcap energy and straight-ahead commercial appeal, are very different from the insinuating seductions of Nara's work, whose cheesy charms keep viewers stirred up, but obliquely. Similarly, the lonely artist struggling with inner demons implied by Chelsea White House solicits both reflexive sympathy and a knowing snicker. Though we can be fairly sure that this model of creativity is oceans away from Nara's working life, the question of its psychological reality is both harder and more interesting to come to terms with.

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