Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens
San Jose Museum of Art
July 25 - October 31, 2004
The San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) presents Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens. This traveling exhibition, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, features nearly 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures by Yoshitomo Nara, one of the most influential artists to emerge from Japan during the Pop art movements of the nineties.
The prolific and soft-spoken Yoshitomo Nara is internationally recognized for his neo-pop paintings and sculptures that feature big-eyed, alternately sad, mischievous or even malevolent children. The exhibit is accompanied by a 96-page catalogue featuring 45 color reproductions and essays from pop cultural icons such as Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day, author Dave Eggers, and Blondie front-woman Debbie Harry.
Yoshitomo Nara creates deceptively simple paintings, sculptures, and drawings that invite one to reconnect with the defiant spirit that comes with youthful optimism and the belief that we may someday change the world. Like the punk rock music that inspires him, Nara’s work emerges out of the despair of feeling invisible in a world where it seems like "nothing ever happens."
Yoshitomo Nara invokes a voice that reaches and touches the masses. His works, which enjoy a cult status in Japan and are among the most recognizable of contemporary art images, appeal to a range of generations, nationalities, and temperaments and are peppered now into the fabric of American pop culture. Adored by everyone from art critics to punk kids, Nara's figures haunt galleries and museums and adorn T-shirts, CD cases, ashtrays and clocks. Even the "cool" characters in some of today's most popular adolescent dramas (Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) have donned Nara T-shirts in past episodes — his characteristic style is an insignia for the idiosyncratic individual who walks to the beat of their own drum.
Over the last decade, contemporary art from Japan has experienced an explosion of interest, both nationally and abroad. Perhaps the most prevalent trend in Japanese contemporary art is the influence of anime (animation) and manga (comic books), both of which feature highly stylized flat surfaces, technology and cyborg-driven narratives, and a preponderance of "cute" characters. Like his contemporaries, Nara's work references childhood and is characterized by a flat, graphic style, but his artistic influences reveal a much broader range, including Renaissance painting, literature, illustration, graffiti and punk rock. While the influence of the fashionable and commercial style dubbed "super flat" by his contemporary, Takashi Murakami, is evident in Nara's paintings (and even sculptures), his work is as steeped in the traditional arts of painting and craftsmanship as it is in the world of popular culture and slick animation.
Disputing commentary that definitively points to anime and manga as a basis of his work, Yoshitomo Nara explains, "People say you have a big influence from Japanese animation. No, I have a big influence from my childhood." Certainly American cartoons and Japanese comics and animated television shows such as Gigantor and Speed Racer were a part of his childhood, but equally influential were the landscape of the Japanese countryside, the isolation it imposed and the imagination it fostered. The paintings, drawings, and sculptures of young children and childhood pets in Nothing Ever Happens are, like real children, more emotionally complex than most adults acknowledge: they are at once charming and accessible, yet enigmatic and charged with undercurrents of malaise and discontent.
Following its premiere at MOCA Cleveland, this first major U.S. exhibition of Nara's work travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, The San Jose Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu. Curated by former MOCA Cleveland curator, Kristin Chambers.
YOSHITOMO NARA was born in 1959 in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. Nara, who currently lives and works in Tokyo, received his BFA (1985) and an MFA (1987) from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music. Between 1988 and 1993, Nara studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. Nara has exhibited widely in his native Japan and abroad. In the United States, he gained national attention as part of the popular group exhibitions, Super Flat (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2000); My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation (Des Moines Art Center, 2001); and Almost Warm and Fuzzy: Childhood and Contemporary Art, (Des Moines Art Center, 2001). Yoshitomo Nara has had nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984. He is represented in NYC by Marianne Boesky Gallery and in Los Angeles by Blum & Poe.
Born in Japan in 1959, Yoshitomo Nara was raised in post–World War II Japan, an era defined by aggressive economic development and an influx of pop culture influences from the West, including the animation of Walt Disney and Warner Bros. While many of his contemporaries were inundated by the pop components of a renewed Japanese culture, Nara was a child of working parents, a "latch-key kid" who lived in the country and depended on his imagination, comic books and family pets to keep him company.
What Yoshitomo Nara expresses in his work is the alienation and fierce independence that comes naturally to many children. He depicts a time when innocence and unruliness went hand in hand, when emotions were not expected to be filtered, when make-believe was not equated with lunacy and when the world was a fantastic and terrifying place meant to be explored, not conquered. He invites the viewer to reconnect with the defiant spirit that comes with youthful optimism and regain the certainty that one is able to change the world. Like his punk rock rebel heroes of Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), Mike Ness (Social Distortion) and Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day), Yoshitomo Nara has the ability to speak for a generation. His paintings, drawings and sculptures speak with an originality and authenticity that resonate within the child within us all.
SJMA - SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
110 South Market Street, San Jose, CA 95113
