Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese painter born in Hirosaki in 1959, known for children with oversized heads and hard, sideways stares. He studied in Japan, spent twelve years in Germany from 1988 to 2000, and came home just as the world was turning to Japanese pop culture.
His best known painting, Knife Behind Back, sold in Hong Kong in October 2019 for about 25 million US dollars, a record for a Japanese artist.
A small girl, a blade somewhere out of sight, a stare that does not soften. That is the picture people have in mind when they type his name.
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The first thing to know about the knife is that Nara laughs at it. His breakthrough picture, Girl with a Knife in Her Hand, dates from 1991, and viewers read the blade as menace. He pointed at the scale instead: "Look at them, they are so small, like toys. Do you think they could fight with those? I don't think so."
So what are the girls angry about? Nara never gives a single answer. In 2001 he told Index magazine that his strongest emotion toward the outside world was rebelliousness. In 2020 he told the Wall Street Journal, "I am not an optimist."
The anger has a source, and it starts in a house in northern Japan where a boy spent his afternoons alone with the radio.
What You'll Discover
Why he grew up alone.
What Germany did to his loneliness.
What the knife is really for.
How his hometown found him first.
What the earthquake took from him.
What a small girl sold for.