Everything you need to know about Yoshitomo Nara

In 2019, one of Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings sold at auction for HK$195.7 million — around US$24.9 million. Depicting a wide-eyed girl wearing a red dress, with one arm subtly tucked away behind her body to conceal a knife in her hand, the 6ft x 7ft canvas, Knife Behind Back (2000), soared first past the artist’s auction record of HK$4.5 million, then past it’s presale estimate of HK$6.4 million, eventually settling at a price that made Nara the most expensive Japanese artist ever.

Since then, at least six more of his works have sold for in excess of HK$100 million (which is just under US$13 million).

Despite this, Nara — described by Roberta Smith of The New York Times as bridging ‘high, low and kitsch; East and West; grown-up, adolescent and infantile’ — remains determinedly private. And to many, he is also somewhat misunderstood.

Here, Shigemi Takahashi, chief curator of the Aomori Museum of Art, which houses more than 170 of the artist’s works, offers a primer on everything you need to know about Yoshitomo Nara.

Nara’s artistic style

Nara has spent more than three decades creating striking images of solitary, childlike figures with large heads and confrontational stares, who float in front of sparse, Rothko-like backgrounds.

Their facial features often recall traditional Japanese Otafuku and Okame masks, which are symbols of merriment and good fortune. Their compositions, meanwhile, sometimes reflect poses seen in modern manga and historical ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

Yet despite the innocuous appearance of these youngsters, they’re far from helpless: many appear nonchalant, while others look vaguely sinister. Drawing on motifs ranging from French fairy tales to American punk rock, some are injured or brandish daggers; others sport cigarettes, vampire fangs and crucifixes. The resulting portraits present uneasy dichotomies between cuteness and anger, vulnerability and pain, innocence and anxiety.

‘Look at them, the weapons are so small, like toys. Do you think they could fight with those? I don’t think so,’ Nara once said. ‘Rather, I kind of see the children among other, bigger, bad people all around them, who are holding bigger knives.’

This lexicon has changed little since Nara developed it in the 1990s, only becoming more polished, painterly and luminous in its handling over time. ‘Nara’s visual language resonates with the art movements of the 1980s and 1990s that transcended the boundaries between fine art and popular culture, while also actively incorporating elements of mass media,’ says Takahashi. ‘Simultaneously, his work also represents a deeply personal form of expression — one that he arrived at through a deep exploration of his own inner world while living in a foreign and solitary milieu.’

Nara’s early influences

Nara was born in 1959 in Hirosaki, a city in Japan’s mountainous Aomori prefecture famous for its Edo-period castle and cherry-blossom trees. When he was a child, the busy schedule of his parents, coupled with the large age gap between him and his siblings, left him feeling isolated. ‘I was lonely, and music and animals were a comfort,’ he later recalled. ‘I could communicate better with animals, without words, than communicating verbally with humans.’

As a youngster, Nara immersed himself in American pop culture, which flooded Japan following the Second World War. He read comics, watched Disney cartoons and discovered rebellious rock and folk music via a homemade radio tuned into broadcasts from a nearby US military base. At the age of 16, he began to order his favourite records by post, then spin them in a local café. ‘There was no museum where I grew up, so my exposure to art came from the album covers,’ he once said.

Abandoning early plans to study literature, Nara enrolled at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1985, and a master’s two years later.

In 1988, he relocated to Germany, undertaking an apprenticeship at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under the mentorship of the painter A.R. Penck. There, he developed an interest in the burgeoning Neo-Expressionism scene, fusing his figurative pictures with the bold colours, expressive brushwork and heavy outlines found in the work of the avant-garde movement’s protagonists, most notably Georg Baselitz.

‘In the early period of his time in Germany, unable to speak the language and knowing very few locals, Nara spent much of his time alone in the attic of his Düsseldorf apartment,’ explains Takahashi. ‘He later described these solitary days as a period of intense self-confrontation, recalling his childhood spent alone at home while his parents were at work. His days in Germany, so reminiscent of his youth, became an opportunity to reawaken the childlike sensibility dormant within him.’

In 1994, Nara moved again, this time to Cologne. ‘I needed a setting which would allow me to isolate myself from others to have a real conversation with the inner me… I found my style only after living in solitude,’ he said. Six years later, he finally returned to Japan.

Nara’s mature period

In 2001, Nara’s breakthrough exhibition, I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME, opened at the Yokohama Museum of Art. Around the same time, he became associated with an experimental Japanese art collective called Superflat. Led by the artist Takashi Murakami, the group fused graphic design with fine art to explore Japan’s hyper-consumerist culture.

Nara’s reputation began to spread rapidly, first in Asia, then internationally. His output, however, suddenly declined, after he was deeply affected by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear accident. ‘I became unable to draw,’ he recalled. ‘I was so depressed that I couldn’t help feeling that what I’d been doing was totally meaningless and useless. No one needs art in an extreme situation after all.’

The artist got involved in the relief effort, distributing aid to affected locals and creating work to raise funds for victims of the disasters. When he was finally able to devote himself to art again the following year, his pictures took on a more existential mood. A key work from this period, Wish World Peace (2014), sold at Christie’s in 2022 for HK$97,090,000.

Around the same time, Nara also took up a residency at his alma mater, now called Aichi University of the Arts, where he started to experiment with other media. Character heads were sculpted from bronze or clay, and coated in liquid metal that cracked like the glaze on Song dynasty ceramics. He also developed his lesser-known documentary photography work, which saw him shoot in China, Russia and Afghanistan.

Today, Nara moves between studios in Germany and Japan. For the most part, he avoids collaborations, public appearances, interviews and social media, apart from the rare post of a new work shared with his hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. ‘I’m not a teamwork type of person,’ he has said. ‘I have no “real or personal” life outside of my working life.’

Institutional recognition

In 2019, the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation was established to promote the artist’s work and compile a digital catalogue raisonné.

Two years later, the artist had his first major retrospective outside Japan, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This was followed by a solo show at the Albertina Modern in Vienna in 2023, then a blockbuster exhibition, simply titled Yoshitomo Nara, that toured the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden and the Hayward Gallery in London in 2024-25.

The latter included around 150 of the artist’s drawings, paintings, ceramics and sculptures, as well as his installation My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included — a wooden recreation of the artist’s studio space filled with empty beer bottles, Americana and half-finished illustrations. On the opposite wall hung several hundred 12-inch record sleeves borrowed from the artist’s personal collection of punk, rock and folk music, which was piped into the gallery to provide a soundtrack to the show — mirroring the ‘deafeningly loud’ music he works to.

Nara’s international recognition continues to grow, says the curator. Many important institutions have Nara’s work in their permanent collections, with New York’s Museum of Modern Art alone holding no fewer than 130 of his prints, drawings and paintings.

In April 2025, Nara’s achievements were also recognised with a place on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the year. ‘Nara is an artist who is truly in the moment, in the spirit. He is alive,’ the fashion designer Stella McCartney wrote for his entry in the publication. ‘When you look at his art, you see and feel him. His love of rock ’n’ roll. How he views the world through the eyes of a child who doesn’t understand why we have war and not peace; why we have killed nature instead of living in harmony with her. He is a pure jewel.’

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 15 October 2025, Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, 8-21 October. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales

Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989-2010 is on show at the National Art Center, Tokyo, until 8 December 2025