Educated in Japan and at the Kunstakademie in Duesseldorf, Yoshitomo Nara is renowned for his very particular brand of "anti-cute". His paintings, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited extensively around the world and his work has been the subject of recent major retrospectives at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. He recently featured in the Yokohama Triennale and later this year will exhibit at the Shanghai Biennale.

Yoshitomo Nara is currently exhibiting at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London (till 11/03).

Additional Info
Images / CV
More Images
Toys / T-Shirts
Essay
Books
MOCA Cleveland review (2004)
Another review (2004)
One more review (2004)
Artforum review (2001)
Over the Rainbow (2005)
From the Depth of My Drawer (2004)
Nothing Ever Happens (2003 - 2004)
KF#150: images // KF#151: images // KF#152: images // KF#154: images

This interview was conducted in person at Stephen Friedman Gallery in 02/02/06.

James Lindon: I want to start by asking about your army of characters. How do you conjure them and do they have a relationship with each other? I notice that they are often unnamed and instead their titles embody sensibilities, activities, emotions and states. How detailed is your characterization of these figures?

Yoshitomo Nara: They are all self-portraits in a way. But the emotions that I feel can, of course, be universal. Often the characters are representations of me but they are also representations of the countless others who identify with them.

JL: But, the role of narrative is still important is it not? You are often written about in relation to your "latch-key" childhood. How do you think that set of biographical references and its suggested sub-cultures relates to your practice versus the respective sub-cultures and references that inform someone like Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw? You all seem to be invested in your biography but with very different ends.

YN: I would say that I am interested in the way that the passing of time affects how one remembers particular events. When and how I recall events is most important. For example, my experience of being in Afghanistan in 2002 is only really starting to affect my work now. When I first returned I couldn't really process the events that had passed. As time as gone on it has become easier to see the hardships of those I met more clearly. In the same way, how I grew up has an enormous influence on the way that I make art now: the fact that I work in isolation in my studio, without a studio assistant, could be said to reflect the time that I spent alone as a child.

JL: Tell me about the techniques you employ when painting, about the process of building up your canvases.

YN: I never know how each painting is going to turn out and I never plan a painting. The images just emerge automatically. Each painting is made up of many layers of paint -- sometimes maybe twenty layers. And, all the figures in my paintings have many other sketched figures behind them. In this sense, I believe that each painting has its own "truth" -- that it dictates how it should be realised not me. I play very little part in its ultimate "truth".

JL: I am also rather intrigued by the reasons behind your multifarious practice: sculpture, drawing, painting and photography. How do you justify the slippage between each, or does it not really need justifying?

YN: They are all very different things for me. Drawing is like my diary. If I am sitting in my studio and see some pretty girls on the television then I draw some pretty girls. Or if I am depressed, angry or drunk then my drawings express these different states of being. Painting on the other hand is a very serious activity for me. I consider myself principally a painter, and as I have already described, I believe my paintings express some sort of naked truth automatically -- they cannot be planned, they just emerge. By contrast my sculptures are always planned down to the tiniest detail. I know exactly how each sculpture is going to turn out even before I start making them.

JL: The market seems to have become a significant variable in the way you that you work: from the merchandising of your motifs and their commercial production and distribution to the continued strength of your work on the secondary market. Did you always conceive of the market as a building block? If not, when did it become important?

YN: The market is not important to me at all! My heart sinks when I see one of my paintings on the front of some auction catalogue. My foray into merchandising was to enable those who could not afford to buy my art works an opportunity to have something of mine. I always work with very small commercial production and distribution companies, never big corporations. I like the contact that I get to have with the people who make my merchandise and the discussions and debates that happen as a result, but most of all I appreciate the way that this merchandising allows so many more people to have contact with what I do.

JL: Michael Kimmelmann's famous criticism of Kurt Varnedoe's 1990 exhibition High & Low at MoMA was that, and I quote, "The question is not whether but why popular culture and modern art have been so inextricably bound together." You seem to weave Kimmelmann's sentiments effortlessly through your practice. How would you answer the "why" part of his question?

YN: Popular culture and art have never been separate for me, but I do recognize the import of different audiences and different mechanisms to connect with those different audiences. The people who buy my paintings, sculptures and drawings might be different from those who buy my T-Shirts. As an artist I want to be able to interact with both groups and I am interested in finding ways to do this.

JL: Murakami is quoted as saying that the culmination of pop was the elimination of narrative and emotion -- ie the conventional elements in the history of painting. With this in mind, how does Murakami's "Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art" fit into your oeuvre now six years after he wrote it?

YN: Murakami is one of my closest friends and one of the reasons that we are such great friends is that our work is so totally different. My work never fitted into the theory of "Super Flat", our respective practices were simply grouped together by the international art world. My art combines both narrative and emotion and hence defies the ideas espoused by Murakami. I think that international critics miss the subtleties and nuances of Japanese culture, and, as a consequence the very different ways that Takashi and I deal with those subtleties. We were grouped together initially but our work couldn't be further apart.

James Lindon is the associate sales director at Victoria Miro Gallery and a freelance curator and critic.

Image © Yoshitomo Nara