Yoshitomo Nara at Ginza Art Space

Art in America, July, 1999 by Les Joynes

Yoshitomo Nara titled his exhibition "No They Didn't." That's an answer. So it forces a question on viewers of the wall of acrylic-wash-and-pencil paintings that opened his show. They are portraits of wide-eyed or shiftily squinting cartoonlike children with engorged, encephalitic heads. One look at their evil eyes and you know that they did it--whatever "it" might be, from mischievous to monstrous. These "innocent babes" express an inner rebellion bordering on demonic possession.

Some of the works.-are executed on top of magazine pages whose images and text peep through the paint in that hasty and knowingly naive style currently popular in Europe and the U.S. Like many Western artists, Nara, who has a studio in Cologne, works with binary oppositions. He plays with conflicting metaphors such as high art/low art, innocent/sinister, safe/dangerous in both his paintings and sculptures, and uses symbols and words recognizable in both the West and his native Japan.

Nara's work is influenced by Japanese comic books--manga--but he is unique in the contemporary-art scene here for bedeviling his typically cute and vulnerable figures with a Western-influenced horror-film element. The children peer at the viewer through black-void, dagger-blade eyes, clutching a knife or saw in a final stand of rebellion or incipient insanity. One recalls the Diane Arbus-inspired twin girls standing in the bloody hotel hallway in Kubrick's film of Stephen King's The Shining. Nara's tapping into Western horror through the medium of the innocent child is particularly poignant in Japan's controlled society of rigid language and social structures, especially considering recent shockingly violent crimes in Japan involving children as the aggressors. Some people have regarded Nara's work itself as threatening.

In the gallery's second room was Three Dogs from Your Childhood, an installation of three identical 5-foot-tall puppies circling an empty comic-style dog dish. They stand on 2-foot-tall wooden stilts based loosely on traditional wooden platform sandals, or geta. Originally Nara intended to perch them on stilts several feel taller, to heighten (so to speak) the conflict between cuteness and danger. However, because of the gallery's low ceiling, common in many Tokyo venues converted from office space, he had to shorten them, so the dogs look more cuddly than worrisome.

Other Japanese artists influenced by manga include Takashi Murakami, who creates paintings and sculptures that evoke a sense of a hyperreal cartoon world where floating, big-eyed, grinning characters meander aimlessly through a candy-colored void, and Isuru Kasahara, whose sculptures are troll-like characters. Nara distinguishes himself by merging Western and Japanese concepts to create images that leave the viewer feeling both seduced and perturbed.