5 things to know about Yoshitomo Nara

Nara’s works, particularly his powerful portraits of child-like figures with eyes that seem to gaze back at the viewer, have seen him become one of the world’s most celebrated artists.

From June to August 2025 the Hayward Gallery brought the captivating creative world of Nara to life in the largest European retrospective of his work to date, featuring more than 150 works, spanning drawing, sculpture, painting, installation and ceramics.

Whether you’re already familiar with the artist, or you’re new to his work, here are five things to know about Nara, from his lifelong love of music to his staunch anti-war stance.

He’s best known for his distinctive child-like characters

Nara has become globally recognised for his portraits of large-headed and wide-eyed childlike figures. These characters initially took shape and became a recurring fixture of the artist’s works in the early 1990s during his studies at Germany’s Kunstakademie Düsseldorf – a period the artist has described as one of the most important to his development.

These expressive characters, sometimes portrayed in animal-like costumes, are filled with rebellious attitudes. Childlike in stature, but also seemingly ageless, they look back directly at the viewer conveying feelings of joy, soulfulness and defiance, but also isolation. There’s a sense of the artist projecting himself through these characters, with Nara himself having said that they are all, in effect, self-portraits.

Music is an ever present theme, in both his life and his work

As a young boy growing up in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, Nara was often left to his own devices by his working parents. He constructed a radio and with it soon stumbled on the network broadcasts of a nearby American military base. Despite not understanding the language, he became fascinated with the music played by the station. Through these broadcasts he developed an early love of folk songs – particularly those with anti-authority themes emerging from the civil rights movement – from artists such as Bob Dylan and Nara’s personal favourite, Donovan. In adulthood this would evolve into a love of rock and punk, from groups including The Byrds and The Ramones.

Nara has said that the first visual art he ever encountered was that of album covers, and it’s a medium he’s regularly explored himself, producing original album artwork for bands including R.E.M., Shonen Knife, Bloodthirsty Butchers and Yo La Tengo. Nara’s lifelong fandom of album artwork is reflected in this retrospective with a full-wall installation of 12” album covers from the artist’s personal record collection – a monument to his life of record-buying.

Beyond his cover art, music and the musicians he admires are a recurring theme through Nara’s practice. Works such as Light My Fire (2001) and Blitz Krieg Bop (2003) share their titles with songs loved by the artist and The Ramones’ refrains of ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!’ and ‘One, Two, Three Four’ can be seen written upon several of his works.

His depictions of houses reflect his changing feelings on the notion of ‘home’

Another motif that appears often in Nara’s work is that of the house. ‘As a child I saw home as a safe place… a place of refuge. But since adolescence I wanted to distance myself from it,’ explains the artist. ‘The house that appears repeatedly in my early works has the shape of home but lacks any sense of lived-in reality’.

However, during his 12 years living in Germany, Nara began to reassess his feelings towards his hometown, and how it had shaped him as an artist. When he returned to Japan in the 2000s he created a number of house installations, including My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included, which possess a much greater intimacy than his earlier house paintings and sketches. Looking inside My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included, the viewer can see a slice of an artist’s life, with sketches scattered over every surface, candles worn down, and empty beer bottles by the wall.

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami had a significant effect on him

The earthquake and subsequent catastrophic tsunami that struck Japan on 11 March 2011 had a particular impact on Nara and his work. It devastated a region of the country known well to the artist, through which he regularly travels to visit his mother in Hirosaki. In its aftermath he felt unable to paint – save for a few works he created for fundraising – and instead took time to lead workshops for students and children displaced by the disaster and accompanied his mother to deliver supplies to those affected.

When Nara felt ready to go back to his art he did so initially through sculpture, working in clay in the company of students at his former university in Nagoya. When he returned to painting a year later his familiar child-like characters were presented with a new quiet intensity, blurred at their edges and with a solemnity to their expressions that suggested they were deep in thought.

His lifelong anti-war and anti-nuclear stance is evident in his work

Having grown up in a Japan rapidly rebuilding following the Second World War and the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and having been greatly inspired by the folk and rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, it’s perhaps of little surprise that Nara has maintained a lifelong anti-war and anti-nuclear stance.

It is a theme that regularly recurs in the artist’s work, in paintings such as No Nukes (1998), No War (2019) and Stop the Bombs (2019) which see his child-like figures displaying the titular slogans. The peace symbol too is a recurring motif, as seen in his drawings Peace Flag (2014) and Peace Girl (2019) and the work Peace Mark (2004).

In the catalogue for his Hayward Gallery exhibition, Nara tells us ‘I didn’t originally want to become an artist. As a child, I believed in justice and wanted to say ‘NO!’ to things that were not right’. As an adult he has succeeded in doing both.

Header image: Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara’s Sleepless Night (Sitting), 1997. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.