The artist Nara Yoshitomo was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world this year by Time magazine. What is it about his pictures, which often feature young girls with defiance in their eyes, that makes them so appealing to people around the world?
Question Marks Thrown at the Adult World
On October 19, 2024, the Guggenheim Bilbao in the Basque country in northwestern Spain was bustling with energy. Admission was waived for the day to celebrate the anniversary of the museum’s opening, and the major exhibition of works by Nara Yoshitomo that had run since June was now approaching its end.
Crowds gathered at opening time and were steadily funneled into the exhibition spaces. The rooms of the museum were full of people immersed in their own thoughts and impressions, enjoying the artworks in their own way: a woman silently contemplating each work alone, a man pointing out pictures to a child in a stroller, and couples happily photographing each other in front of canvases that had particularly caught their eye. According to the museum, as many as 11,000 people visited the exhibition on this one day alone.
The Nara Yoshitomo exhibition in the Guggenheim Bilbao. (© Takahashi Shigemi)
In April 2025, Nara was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2025. He was nominated by fashion designer Stella McCartney, who wrote the following tribute explaining her affection for Nara and his work:
His work is not only childlike, innocent, and direct—it also carries messages that we need to hear, presented in a way we can digest with humor and clarity.
Nara is an artist who is truly in the moment, in the spirit. He is alive. 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.
It is now nearly 40 years since Nara began his career as an artist. His works continue to captivate people of all ages and backgrounds around the world. This article looks back on the creative path he has followed in his life so far, and explores what it is that makes his work so appealing to so many people.
A Childhood Love of Rock ‘n Roll and Art
Nara Yoshitomo was born in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, in 1959. The 18 years he spent in this northernmost prefecture of Honshū before leaving for university were a defining period that played an indelible role in developing his artistic sensibility.
With both his parents working, Nara spent a lot of time at home on his own, talking to the characters in his picture books, action figures, and other toys, and developing his imagination through his interactions with animals, including the family cat and a sheep that lived in a neighbor’s garden.
It was during his childhood that Nara first fell in love with music, which has been a major source of nourishment and support throughout his life. At home he was able to pick up the signal of the Far East Network, broadcast to US troops stationed at the Misawa air base in the prefecture. From his time in elementary school, he loved to tune in to American music on the station using a small crystal radio he had made himself. By the time he entered junior high school he had started to devour American rock and folk.
As the war in Vietnam grew more intense, he began to realize the vast potential of music as a social force, learning from musicians like Bob Dylan and Neil Young who used the visceral energy of rock and powerful lyrics to fight back against the blare of bombs and cannons. The jackets of the records he bought with his pocket money were the main sources of visual stimulation in Hirosaki, which still did not have a museum in those days. The illustrations, photographs, and typefaces deepened his interest in art as well as music itself.
After graduating from high school, he came to Tokyo to attend an art school, but dropped out in his first year. In 1981, he entered Aichi University of the Arts, where he majored in oil painting, and went on to graduate school. In those days, he was heavily influenced by the “new painting,” characterized by the use of vibrant colors and rough, expressive brushwork. In 1988, he went to study in Germany, where his piece Make the Road, Follow the Road, completed in 1990, showed the lingering influence of this movement.
Make the Road, Follow the Road. (© Yoshitomo Nara/image courtesy of Yoshitomo Nara Foundation /Aomori Museum of Art)
The painting features many of the elements that were to become familiar motifs in Nara’s work: a girl, plants, an animal, a knife, and a flame. The girl holds out a knife to a cat, drawn simply and looking defenseless. Her face is expressionless, quite different from the figures of children that Nara would create later in his career, with their sharp eyes and penetrating expressions. The background is painted with bold strokes mostly in orange, against which the thin traced outline of a house is vaguely discernible. This technique of painting over the house with a different layer of color can perhaps be seen as a declaration of an emotional separation from “home.”
The First Classic Pictures
During his first six years in Germany, Nara learned from leading artists like Michael Buthe and A.R. Penck at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. One time, Penck advised him to try painting freely on the canvas as if executing a drawing or sketch. Nara says this piece of advice made him realize that he had been excessively respectful of painting on canvas as “high art.”
He changed his approach and started tracing motifs using bold black lines. One piece from this period, The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991), shows a girl looking up at the viewer with a knife against a shimmering purple background like the surface of a lake. This had a decisive impact on the direction his work would take for the rest of his career.
The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand. (© Yoshitomo Nara/image courtesy of Yoshitomo Nara Foundation)/ San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan, fractional and promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.)
After finding his own distinctive style, Nara began to produce a steady stream of what would become his best-known and best-loved works. Mumps (1996) was one of the early masterpieces produced during his years in Germany.
The picture features another of Nara’s young girls. As the title suggests, the girl in the picture has cheeks swollen from illness, and wears a fabric tied around her head as a bandage. She stares with sharp, keen eyes at the viewer, her lips slightly apart as if there is something she wants to say. She has been enduring prolonged pain, and seems angry at the audience in front of her, who have either failed to notice her suffering or at least failed to show any concern for it.
Pieces of white cotton cloth, cut into rectangles, are affixed to the canvas like patchwork. The simple, bare texture of this background, evocative of bandages or patches for mending clothes, implicitly evokes the physical and emotional pain of the girl in the picture.
Mumps. (© Yoshitomo Nara/image courtesy of Yoshitomo Nara Foundation /Aomori Museum of Art)
A Shift in Values
After 12 years in Germany, Nara returned to Japan in 2000. He shot to prominence following the success of his first major solo show in Japan, I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me, held in 2001. He began to receive a steady stream of offers to hold exhibitions overseas, and became an artist with an international reputation.
A major turning point came with the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. The earthquake and ensuing tsunami that engulfed Nara’s home region of Tōhoku dramatically shook the foundations of his creative life and pushed him to reexamine his values.
Miss Spring (2012) was produced the year after the tsunami disaster. The picture features the torso of a young girl, continuing a favorite motif that Nara had used throughout his career, but in this enlarged picture the girl is shown from the chest up, almost like an ID photo. The evocative technique, combined with the girl’s restrained, resolutely forward-looking expression, the deliberately blurred outline, and the layered, exposed colors, reflect Nara’s attempt to capture a “divided, irreconcilable state of mind,” consisting of the contrasting emotions of sadness and anger at the natural disaster and nuclear accident, alongside the joy and gratitude of everyday life.
Miss Spring. (© Yoshitomo Nara/image courtesy of Yoshitomo Nara Foundation /Yokohama Museum of Art)
More recently, Power in a Union (2024) was inspired by Billy Bragg’s song “There Is Power in a Union” calling for solidarity among workers.
Power in a Union. (© Yoshitomo Nara/image courtesy of Yoshitomo Nara Foundation)
The rudimentary and fragile-looking torso of a child is drawn at disproportionate size, almost overspilling from the roughly one-meter-high board. Nara often renders motifs of smallness or childishness on a giant scale, imbuing his pictures with a sense that what looks small and weak can sometimes contain an immense power. In this work too, he conveys a message that people who are small and weak on their own can possess a formidable strength if they come together in solidarity. The piece conveys a timely message from Nara to contemporary society, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen.
Small Blows Against Invisible Walls
Nara has always been an avid reader. His distinctive feel for language, honed through his love of literature, is on display in the poems he wrote in the 1990s. One of them, “Arashi no yoru ni” (On a Stormy Night), contains the following lines.
The reality in which we find ourselves now is full of alienation and indifference,
And at times even our worries and cares are carried off into the distance.
But even in this magnetic field of negativity,
In a situation where I cannot move,
I am determined to step forward, even if it must be diagonally;
Even if it means merely continuing to circle the labyrinth,
I am determined to strike small blows against the invisible walls,
And to keep laughing, coolly.
When this poem was written nearly 30 years ago, the age of economic hardship and stagnation had already begun. There is still no exit in sight. Despite the challenges and difficulties, Nara has remained true to his creed through his artistic work, continuing to step forward, even if not always in a straight line, striking small blows against invisible walls. This undaunted determination must surely have been what Stella McCartney had in mind when she described him as an artist who is truly in the moment, in the spirit.
Nara’s works convey an attitude of lightness and are imbued with the courage to face the challenges of life without fear, however overwhelming they might appear, and the determination to keep on smiling coolly. This attitude is surely a large part of what brings hope to people around the world, giving them the strength to endure in an age of hardship.
Since 1998, Aomori Museum of Art has been collecting works by Nara, and it now has over 170.
Official site: Aomori Museum of Art
(Originally published in Japanese on August 15, 2025. Banner photo: Nara Yoshitomo at the opening ceremony for his exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain on June 27, 2024. © AFP/Jiji.)