Yoshitomo Nara: The Complete Story
Yoshitomo Nara is the Japanese painter of big-headed children with sideways eyes, born in Hirosaki in 1959. One of those children, Knife Behind Back, sold for 25 million dollars in Hong Kong in October 2019, a record for any Japanese artist.
The girls look sweet from across the room and furious up close. Here is where that stare comes from.
Yoshitomo Nara at a glance
1959. Born in Hirosaki, in apple country at the northern tip of Honshu.
1988. Left for Germany and enrolled at the Düsseldorf academy.
2000. Returned to Japan after twelve years away.
2001. His first big traveling survey, I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me, toured Japan.
2019. Knife Behind Back sold for nearly 25 million dollars in Hong Kong, a record for a living Japanese artist.
A latchkey childhood with the radio on
Nara grew up in snow country, in Hirosaki at the northern tip of Honshu, a third son whose parents both worked.
He came home to an empty house, and the radio filled it: an American military station broadcasting from a nearby base fed him rock and punk before he understood a word of English.
Album covers were his first art school, and he has designed record sleeves ever since.
Twelve years in Germany
In 1988 he moved to the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, where the painter A.R. Penck took him on, and he stayed in Germany until 2000. Alone again, this time without the language, he stripped his painting down to what loneliness had taught him: one figure, an empty ground, a feeling delivered straight. The children arrived there, closer to pop art and punk flyers than to anything taught in class.
More incredible painter stories
If Yoshitomo Nara pulled you in, you will love these too:
Punk sleeves and band flyers
Nara’s other career runs through record shops. He has drawn covers for Japanese punk bands, most famously Shonen Knife.
His studio walls are stacked with the records he grew up on, and he paints with them playing.
Ask him about influences and he names songs before painters.
Ten thousand drawings on scraps
Nara draws constantly on whatever is at hand: envelopes, cardboard, flyers, hotel stationery.
The scrap drawings are not studies. Many are finished works, and museums now frame the envelopes.
It keeps the hand honest, he has said. Nothing precious about the paper, everything about the line.
Clay in Shigaraki
Since the late 2000s Nara has worked in ceramics at Shigaraki, one of Japan’s old pottery towns.
The big headed girls turned into glazed clay, lumpy, hand pressed, deliberately imperfect.
He has described clay as drawing with his whole body.
The myth: the knife girl is violent
The most famous paintings show a small girl holding a blade, and they are often read as menace. Nara points out how tiny the knife is against the world around her. His children are the threatened ones, cornered and refusing to cry, and the anger in their eyes is self-defence. That reversal is the engine of the work.
The 25 million dollar child
Knife Behind Back, a girl painted in 2000 with her hands hidden, sold at Sotheby's in Hong Kong on 6 October 2019 for 195.7 million Hong Kong dollars, about 25 million US, the highest price ever paid for a work by a Japanese artist.
When the earthquake stopped his hand
The earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 hit his home region, and for months Nara could not draw at all.
He turned to clay, then bronze, working the material with his hands, and when the painted faces returned they had changed: softer, the eyes deep pools rather than daggers.
Critics who followed him from the start read his whole career in that shift.
Where to see Nara
The Aomori Museum of Art, near his hometown, keeps his 8.5 metre white dog sculpture Aomori-ken on permanent view. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a full career retrospective in 2021, and his paintings hang in MoMA in New York.
The Yoshitomo Nara questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Paintings of big-headed children whose sweet style hides defiance and loneliness.
Why do the children hold knives? As self-defence. Nara says they are the small ones facing a much bigger world.
Where is he from? Hirosaki, in Aomori prefecture, at the far north of the Japanese main island.
What is his auction record? Knife Behind Back sold for about 25 million dollars at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2019.
Does Nara design album covers? Yes, most famously for the Japanese punk band Shonen Knife. Music has always been the engine of the work.
Does Nara work in ceramics? Yes. Since the late 2000s he has worked in clay at Shigaraki, turning his girls into hand pressed glazed sculpture.
More secrets to unlock
Ten minutes from the radio
In 2006 Nara filled an old brick cider warehouse in Hirosaki with his work, a homecoming show built with volunteers. In 2020 those same warehouses reopened permanently as the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art. The angry little girls now live ten minutes from where the lonely boy listened to the radio.
