Yoshitomo Nara’s career matured in the 1980s and 1990s, during a period that saw a merging of mass popular culture and contemporary art. Independent music, fashion, graphic design, illustration, computer technologies, dance club culture, cinema and television became thoroughly intertwined, so much so that previously held definitions of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and commercial and fine art practice became obsolete. Despite a comparatively formal art education in Japan, and later Germany (in both Düsseldorf and Cologne), Nara’s influences are drawn from life, from his friends, and from various scenes and subgenres of music fandom associated with these decades.

While he has attracted significant international attention since his first solo exhibitions in the mid to late 1990s, Nara has tended to adopt an independent DIY spirit, eschewing much of the glamour and promotional ersatz associated with some contemporary ‘art stars’. His studio-based practice of drawing, painting and installation, as well as collaborative projects, retains a particular extemporaneous quality, marking it as unique and personalised.

Renowned for his repertoire of figurative paintings and graphic, cartoon-like characters of children and dogs, an abiding interest in music, particularly punk and non-mainstream rock, remains a cornerstone of Nara’s work. Expressions of rebellion, isolation and a kind of schoolyard violence are often played out through his ambiguously innocent and slightly demented characters, often associated with lines from songs by favourite bands. Critic and curator Michael Wilson has pointed to similar tropes of ‘the self-possessed, willful, often mysterious, sometimes malevolent, and occasionally openly violent child’ found in the ‘evil child’ subgenre of American horror movies, such as Damien in the Omen trilogy (1976–81) and Chucky in the Child’s Play film series (1988–2013).¹ Nara’s characters, however, are less demonic than doleful and annoyed — more likely quoting Ramones or Neil Young lyrics than muttering arcane incantations.

Y.N.G.M.S. (YNG’s Mobile Studio) 2009 draws together several strands of Nara’s practice, including his interest in the realm of private space and evocations of rebellious freedom. Along with children and dogs, huts have been a recurring motif in the artist’s drawings since the 1990s. Usually constructed in a semi-shambolic fashion from recycled materials, these structures are analogous to the private space of the studio, or an adolescent’s bedroom, a child’s backyard cubby or a cabin in the woods — where fantasy and secrets are safe and play is unfettered and free.

Yoshitomo Nara’s first collaboration with ‘graf media gm’, an alternative Japanese design firm, occurred around 2003 and the partnership has continued under the working title of YNG. With graf’s founder, Hideki Toyoshima, Nara visited Brisbane prior to ‘The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ in 2009, and found that the characteristics of the ‘Queenslander’ timber house resonated with their own improvised dwellings. In particular, the understorey of the Queenslander — raised off the ground on timber stumps — is often used as a cool and slightly mysterious play area for children.

YNG’s work uses reclaimed building materials to construct a dwelling which sits atop a small van — a vehicle often associated with a sense of escape, adventure and freedom. Both the van and the hut are decorated with collections of Nara’s creations, including drawings, paintings, t-shirts and posters, as well as toys and found objects — an arrangement that retains some of the incidental quirks and the exploratory, developmental qualities of studio living.

YNG’s huts are intended to be both within and apart from the art museum. They are at once an intervention and an extension of the gallery in which the artist aims to provide ‘a more appropriate home for his smaller works and related artefacts, one that does not inadvertently overwhelm or ossify their contents’.² This connection with a ‘real’ context — a more intimate space encouraging viewers’ own memories and musings — is consistent with Yoshitomo Nara’s desire to create spaces, ‘where visitors find an opportunity to see themselves reflected as though my work were a mirror or a window’.³

Endnotes

1. Michael Wilson, ‘Subject to change: Yoshimoto Nara and American culture’, in Melissa Chiu and Miwako Tezuka, Yoshimoto Nara, Nobody’s Fool [exhibition catalogue], Asia Society Museum in association with Abrams, New York, 2010, p.238
2. Wilson, p.234.
3. Yoshimoto Nara, quoted in Melissa Chiu, ‘A conversation with the artist’, in Chiu and Tezuka, p.179.

Feature image: A view of Y.N.G.M.S. (Y.N.G.'s Mobile Studio) 2009 installed for ‘We Can Make Another Future’, GOMA, February 2015 / © The artists / Photograph: N Harth, QAGOMA