Yoshitomo Nara, One Foot in the Groove, 2012. Courtesy Private collection. © Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Yoshitomo Nara Foundation.
A major retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery invites visitors into the quietly unsettling world of Yoshitomo Nara—the first UK solo show at a public art gallery for the Japanese artist whose cult status has long transcended the art world. Spanning four decades of practice, the exhibition gathers paintings, drawings, sculptures, and rarely seen installations that, together, sketch out the inner landscape of an artist informed by memory, solitude, and the uneasy slippages between childhood innocence and adult disquiet.
Nara’s signature figures—childlike characters with enormous heads, luminous eyes, and defiant, often ambiguous expressions—steal the show like psychic avatars. Simultaneously saccharine and sinister, they evoke both manga aesthetics and folk tales, holding viewers in their steady, unblinking gaze. Missing in Action (1999), with its off-white background and tight-lipped, sulky figure, and Fountain of Life (2024), a monumental sculptural work anchoring the space, are highlights. The latter’s playful yet ominous presence feels particularly alive within Hayward’s Brutalist space.
Yoshitomo Nara, Missing in Action, 1999. Courtesy of Sally and Ralph Tawil and Yoshitomo Nara Foundation. © Yoshitomo Nara.
Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara. Photo:
Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Missing in Action remains one of Nara’s most recognized works: it became iconic in Internet spaces and beyond.
Fountain of Life, sculptural work from 2024, uses Nara’s signature motifs and juxtaposes them with the transient element of water.
A lifelong devotee of punk and folk music, Nara’s practice is deeply informed by sound. The exhibition opens with a wall of record sleeves from the artist’s collection—from Japanese rock to American protest songs—setting the tone for the rest of the show. This soundtrack threads its way through his imagery: guitars appear in paintings as emblems of rebellion and self-expression, while the scrappy, DIY quality of his drawings and sculptural works mirrors the raw immediacy of the music that shaped his youth. It feels fitting that many of Nara’s earliest exhibitions took place in live music venues rather than white-cube galleries.
Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Beneath the deceptively sweet surfaces of his portraits, a persistent anti-authoritarian, anti-war sentiment hums. Works like No Nukes (1998) and Fuck Bomb (2011) confront Japan’s post-war history and ongoing anxieties around nuclear power and militarism with disarming directness. Nara, who was born in the shadow of a US military base in post-war Japan, embeds these tensions in the uneasy expressions of his figures, suggesting that violence and innocence are not opposing forces but intimately entangled. The show resists overt didacticism, but the message lingers in the air—a subtle, melancholic defiance.
Yoshitomo Nara, Sleepless Night (Sitting), 1997. © Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Yoshitomo Nara Foundation.
While painting remains his primary outlet and visual language, Nara’s practice expands across collage, clay, and found objects. Those mediums help unpack themes of home, displacement, war memory, and popular culture, which the exhibition cleverly balances by mounting sketchy, impromptu drawings alongside polished, iconic canvases like diary entries.
Yoshitomo Nara, Fire, 2009, acrylic on wood, 90 x 90 cm (35 3/8 x 35 3/8 in.). Courtesy of the artist and Yuichi Kawasaki Collection.
Yoshitomo Nara, Miss Moonlight, 2020. Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. © Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Yoshitomo Nara Foundation.
Yoshitomo Nara, Power in a Union, 2024, acrylic on wood, 104.5 x 90.7 x 6 (1.2) cm (41 1/8 x 35 6/8 x 2 3/8 in.). Courtesy the artist.
Nara’s style, while looking quite playful, can address more serious topic. The artist consciously plays with humor and medium.
Miss Moonlight demonstrates Nara’s widely celebrated intricate style. He has said in the past that while these are by no means self-portraits, the viewer should be able to connect with the figures and their feelings through their serene expressions.
While best known for his large-scale, meticulously detailed oil paintings, Nara’s signature style carries just as much weight in his simpler, more direct works, where political messages become the subject.
Ultimately, the show blends into and converses with Hayward Gallery’s raw concrete spaces. With playful, tender, and quietly political art, it forms a deeply personal cosmos rendered in layers of color, graffiti-scrawled words, and restless, watchful eyes.
Yoshitomo Nara is on view at the Hayward Gallery, London, until August 31, 2025.
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Art historian and aspiring writer. Interested in contemporary art from Eastern Europe, Latin America and East Asia, transnational networks of artistic collaboration and exchange, and modernist architecture and design.
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