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LACMA Unveils the Largest Retrospective on Yoshitomo Nara to Date
A thorough look at one of Japan’s premier contemporary artists.
LACMA is currently viewing the largest retrospective to date on famed Japanese artist, Yoshitomo Nara. For those who only know Nara through his instantly recognizable ‘big-headed girls,’ fail to realize the complexity that lies underneath his paintings, drawings and sculptures.
Born in Hirosaki, a small castle town 400 miles north of Tokyo, Nara always carried a sense of being an outsider. Growing up near a US Air Force base in post-war Japan and the young artist was always acutely aware of his country’s troubled history for battle and nuclear warfare. As his parents would be off for most the day working, Nara felt lonely yet staunchly happy in his independence. Nara would first be introduced to art through his fascination with music. “For Nara, finding a newly released or hard-to-find recording was part of the excitement of transgressing such geographical boundaries,” writes associate professor and Chair of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Hong Kong, Yeewan Koon, in a monograph on the artist. He would go on to consume as much contemporary music as any young person back West — from Janis Joplin and the Beatles, Johnny Cash and David Bowie, Pink Floyd and The Doors — the list goes on. One can truly feel Nara’s passion for music when they first walk into his LACMA exhibition, where a massive wall is covered end-to-end in records.