Yoshitomo Nara
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, USA
Yoshitomo Nara’s impeccable sculpture installation at Blum & Poe guided viewers through many varied states of being, tempting willing onlookers to shed their earthly skins and float into a Technicolor dream world. As one coursed through the gallery from left to right, disembodied children’s heads made of fibreglass, resin and lacquer introduced themselves as tour guides to a new, but not completely unfamiliar ‘society’ where technological, extra-personal fantasy has replaced real human interaction. Nara’s new sculptures continue an investigation into the contemporary relationship of kids, comics, and mass-communications explored elsewhere by this Cologne and Nagoya-based artist in haunting drawings and paintings.
The first works one discovers upon entering the gallery are Amuro Girl (all works 1997) and Puffy Girl, a two-person brat pack hanging on the wall at human height. Their placement on the wall is important, for it helps to establish a bodily connection to the sculptures that slowly dissipates as one’s eyes drift up toward the ceiling to inspect the other pieces in the show. Those familiar with contemporary Japanese popular culture will also recognise the implications of beginning the show with these icons of teen emulation, doors onto worlds of extrapersonal fantasy. In coupling the two, Nara generates his own fantastical cartoon narrative: Amuro Girl with her bulging, gourd-like forehead, squinting, angry, pink eyes, and finish-fetish flip hairdo is the uppity, chronically betrayed older sister fed up with the adult world, while her partner, Puffy Girl, has already given up caring about the atrocities in the realm of the sensate. Puffy Girl has the disaffected, glassy-eyed stare of a latch-key kid who has seen it all before on TV, and provides a bridge to the other works in the show that also seem to describe a new breed of children disconnected from the pulse of reality.
Most of the rest of the exhibition consists of the same kind of exaggerated, stylised cartoon faces, but the others all wear helmets, hats, and hoods that emphasise their exit into a fantasy world, further accentuated by their elevated installation. Grinning Little Bunny, for instance, sports a soft white hood with long, pink-lined rabbit ears, whose textured surface of cotton patchwork makes a refined contrast with the porcelain finish of its face. He (or she?) bears a toothy, mischievous grin and has the same dangerously slanting eyes as Amuro Girl but somehow one senses that this pent-up, ready-to-be-vented energy will not be unleashed on a fellow being, but rather downloaded to combat a fictional enemy on the computer screen. Mr. Sky, hanging nearby, is less actively engaged with the object of his gaze, perhaps because his swollen, bovine-bonneted head and glassy, hepatitic yellow eyes are about to burst as a result of information overload and/or artificial altitude sickness. Mr. Sky’s psychedelic name and drugged-out countenance is as fitting for a child reared on bytes as it is for a blissfully dazed raver, and the piece easily slides between the two not-so-distant realms.
A similar withdrawal is found in the wide-angle stare of Round Eyed Pilot, whose cherubic face and cute, old-fashioned helmet compete with the more ominous suspicion that alpha rays are eating this child’s brain. ...Pilot has that unmistakable look of the kid glued to the television set, and Nara has skilfully prevented any spell-breaking eye contact from being made with this adorable zombie. In all of Nara’s work, endearing sweetness and Pop familiarity lure viewers toward his images, but bubbling undercurrents of malaise and discontent are always nearby, disallowing any wholesale escape from reality. This duplicity is also evident in Little Red Riding Hood, an ostensibly sweet sculpture of a peanut-shaped head, swaddled in a red cotton skullcap and featuring two black crescents that suggest eyes closed in sleep. The tight, mummy-like wrap of the figure’s headgear, however, the disquieting stillness of the face, and its placement higher on the gallery walls than any other piece in the exhibition, work together to eat away at benign tranquillity and intimate the ultimate disassociation from the world: death. Thankfully, the artist lets us have it both ways, neither dragging viewers down with melodramatic doom and gloom, nor presenting a scenario of worry-free beauty and pleasure. Nara tantalises our senses and imaginations, while at the same time honing our understanding of the complexities of the contemporary condition.
Michael Darling
