Pick of the week

Yoshimoto Nara + Graf to 26 Oct

Baltic, Gateshead

Hideki Toyoshima, the founder of a design company called Graf, and the artist Yoshitomo Nara began working together five years ago. Part of their ongoing A-Z Project collaboration is on display at the Baltic. In this piece, the pair create wooden buildings that will eventually lead to the setting up of a fictional town.

For the show, Nara has "reinterpreted" two house-like structures that originally went on display in Germany and Holland (above). As usual, Nara's art, which consists of drawings, paintings and sculptures of children, adorns each living space. His subjects, though, all have "adult" expressions, a contrast that is both compelling and unsettling.

One of Nara's key interests, I think, is the way in which childhood can be undermined, maybe even contaminated, by the insistent demands of a fully blown consumer culture. Drawing on punk, manga and a sense of kawaii (cuteness in Japanese), his vision of the world is of a pitiless place in which vulnerabilities are sure to be exploited.

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