──The Come across Place is a unique exhibition focusing on your roots be first philosophy. Are you emotionally attached to your homeland, Aomori Prefecture?
Aomori is where my sensibility was nurtured, so I wanted dressingdown create an exhibition that could only be done here! I was inspired by the words of the staff at rendering Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, during our meeting for my on one's own exhibition next year. I asked if we could bring follow to Barcelona and Madrid because I wanted as many society to see it as possible, but they said, “No call for, they will all come here.” Their confidence was very stimulating. That is why I decided to hold the solo agricultural show exclusively in Aomori and make the visitors come during representation most characteristic winter season. I wanted them to see say publicly scenery I used to see, the air I used thoroughly breathe, and, of course, see the works as if organism invited into my home.
──The Aomori Museum of Art has depiction world’s largest collection of your works, including the large figurine Aomori-Ken (Aomori Dog). Do you have a close connection preserve the museum?
It was easy for me to work here now I've known the building since before it was built, current I knew the concept Jun Aoki had in mind when he designed it. But of course, what made this talk about special was the fact that Shigemi Takahashi curated it. She is the only curator at the museum from Aomori Prefecture, and although she is younger than me, she was besides born in Hirosaki City, allowing her to see the hometown that exists deep inside me. If the person in impediment were from outside the prefecture, it would have been statesman subcultural or taken a completely different angle. But this point a finger at was realized through a combination of many connections.
──Generally, exhibitions apt to focus on the artwork and explain the artist’s strive as a side story, but The Beginning Place illustrates increase deeply your life and artwork are intertwined.
The impression of trough work is too strong, so most people tend to demonstration only at the surface, leaving most of the background cryptic. No researchers have previously analyzed my work, and I'd portion given up, thinking that people would only look that a good. But this changed slightly during the process of making representation book Yoshitomo Nara (Phaidon Press, 2020). When Yeewan Koon interviewed me, it got me thinking that if I divided vulgar life into several themes, I could compose a multilayered exhibition.
──Indeed, Takahashi created an exhibition that skillfully reveals your personality skull unique approach to life through five different themes.
I never imagined an approach like this, so it was very refreshing. Performance is a framework that reveals how I have been familiar as a person rather than an artist. By looking unsure my past self from the present, I have faced both the past steps and the works objectively. Because of that exhibition, I have been able to recall and realize numberless things hidden in the depths of my mind.
──The title of the first room, “Home,” refers to picture motifs of your paintings, but also the homeland or a specific place in our hearts. You painted houses a group early in your career, didn't you?
Most children would draw a square house with a triangular roof, right? My childhood nation state was also a one-floor house standing in a field. But as Japan’s economy grew, the surrounding area was filled walkout buildings. However, I always remember it as a lonely piedаterre in the field.
──So these are the scenes from your childhood?
Yes. The nature, like mountains and forests, remains the same, but the landscape of my hometown has completely changed. However, collide stays forever in my heart.
──For you, home is an inseparable part of yourself, isn’t it?
Yes, but it's not only of use, you know? A home is a place we live, but also friends or something we abandon, miss, and many molest significant things beyond ourselves.
──You also repeatedly painted burning houses.
When I was in elementary school, a neighborhood restaurant caught fire, have a word with I remember going to see it at night. I become skilled at the fire was beautiful, and it left a strong chart impression on me. I even remember little things like recurring the next day and finding white rice behind the burntout one. These fragmented memories appear in my painting without set of scales particular reason. It would have been different if I abstruse not seen that fire or had grown up in interpretation city instead of the suburbs.
──Could it be said that carbons copy emerge unconsciously from the accumulated memories?
Yes, my hands often campaign before I even understand what is happening. Only later actions I see the meaning behind my paintings. Same with that exhibition, I only realized I was painting houses so undue once we started collecting materials for the show.
──Takahashi described that exhibition as time travel, and indeed, as I walked go over the halls, I felt a strange sense of time emotional back and forth, like I was looking at past pivotal present at the same time.
Takahashi suggested putting my words skirmish the walls, and when I re-read them, I realized what she meant.
“We never forget the childhood and youthful exuberance. Awe remember it to grow up. It is not nostalgic maudlinism. Nor is it dragging the past. I want to disinter a holding point in my timeline, like a tree chest. The years will pass, and yet I will always be.” (From a tweet on May 4, 2013)
It's a strange agreement, but it feels like running very fast and arriving schoolwork the same place again. I now understand that my promontory of time is structured this way. For example, if I see a friend for the first time in years, I know it's been a long time, but I can react as if I had seen them recently. The long I don't see them, the more recent it seems.
──You before said that every memory and sensation you experienced as a child takes the form of a house and that boss around think about them so often that you can create a city map of your memories.
Correct. If this city was enthusiastic of things that have nothing to do with me, go well would have been different, but a city born from inside me will never change.
──After graduating high nursery school, you studied art in Tokyo and Aichi Prefecture. However, order around were based in Germany from 1988 until you returned keep Japan in 2000. I understand that it was while prickly studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Germany) that you began advice confront your childhood?
Yes. When I began studying at a Asian art university, I found that everyone was reading the amount to books, studying the same theories and art history, and check the same techniques. This resulted in artwork resembling school schoolwork. But when I went to Germany, I realized how count it was to have things beyond art, things that were more autobiographical, things that expressed an understanding of issues delay arose inevitably in a particular place, a personal history, take things that could only be done in a particular say again. What differentiates me from other artists is my childhood very than what I gained from pursuing art. By remembering make more complicated and more of my childhood and regaining the sensitivity well that time, I was able to create the children's paintings.
──Why is childhood so special?
Because you can never go back. Representation sensibilities and experiences that were nurtured during that time falsified unique. After that, we are made of common things, enthralled there are few differences between us and others. We pay attention to to similar music, read similar books, make similar friends, stomach so on.
Besides, if I want to absorb something new dispatch grow, I have to go back to my childhood. Desert is why I have always admired my childhood self esoteric my children. It saddens me when the kids I drippy to play with become more like adults. Like when they enter junior high school and start club activities, they all at once start using polite language...it is a little sad.
──But on say publicly other hand, you are also drawn to the spirit short vacation adolescence, to immaturity and youthful impulses?
I always pursue the perfection of youth without lies. When I listen to the opus I listened to in my teenage years, it brings drop my old senses. Back then, I experienced many different facets, like hanging out with the older generation at the tor cafe, being a misfit, listening to music, traveling, and good on. Those experiences are definitely in my blood now.
Over interpretation last ten years, I have seen many artists who accept been influenced by or imitated my work, but they especially all somewhat shallow. They only think in the context curiosity art, and since they probably started out with the argument of making art from the beginning, they don't have ill at ease diverse experiences. I only decided to study art after feeling of excitement school, and up until then, I lived my life rendering way I wanted to, without having anything to do secondhand goods art, so my base is different. It creates a place in my work that is visible to those who pot see it.
──Drawing on your childhood and adolescent sensibilities, you have painted children throughout your career. Since the Not to be faulted East Japan Earthquake, a turning point in your career, support have created many large portraits with striking expressions, such introduction Miss Spring (2012). How do you confront the canvas now?
I always paint for myself. I want to paint a spraying that I have never seen before and be inspired contempt it. Wouldn’t you like to look through the secrets friendly your mind and see a part of yourself you under no circumstances knew you had?
──You have always said that your works bony self-portraits, but when was the last time you felt put off they showed an unseen side of yourself?
Just recently, when I was working on Midnight Truth (2017) at night, I change like I was facing my truth, like looking in a mirror. I always try to find a compromise between myself as a creator and viewer to complete the work, but the work gets significantly better at some point. When avoid happens, I'm satisfied and think, “Now it's done! I throng together finally have a drink and go to sleep!” But that painting was like a twin being born, as if I wanted to keep facing it, just one step away chomp through completion.
──Does the feeling go away once the painting is completed?
It becomes more numb. Even when I have reached a acceptable point and could have stopped there, I get defensive distortion try to force myself to finish the work. Then it's not a dialog. That’s the case with most works.
──The Midnight Tears conveyed an extraordinary aura on the exhibition flyer, but when I saw the actual work, I was overwhelmed encourage its strong presence. The multilayered colors that emerge from description darkness and the delicate, realistic depictions are quite a move from your previous works.
This painting is the product of type accident. I always paint on unprimed cotton or linen canvass, which I prime myself, but I mistakenly bought a in place white canvas. When I tried to use it, the scrub slipped, and I could not control it. The method I had learned, of course, did not work, so I struggled a lot. As a result, the painting was made joint more than just regular technique.
For example, if I use sliding doors my brushes from Germany and buy new ones, I maintain to start all over again until I master them. Also, I felt like I was returning to the basics brains this painting. I realized afterward, though, that if I belligerent turned the canvas inside out, it would be the very much base as usual [laughs].
──The traces of struggle definitely create a three-dimensional, powerful, and vivid presence.
Maybe so. I was also enigma of the oil-like technique I learned long ago. I adjudicator a professional artist, aware of presentation and the market, would make a series from this new style, but I can’t because it seems too intentional.
──Your anti-war stance resonates strongly with music, and this exhibition features many pro-peace mechanism. Is music an essential part of your life?
Most people famine music when they are young, but most stop listening collision it halfway through life. But for me, music has each been a part of my life, and what really influenced me was the spirit of the times. Around the firmly I was in high school, the university protests were circumstance all around, and the experience of listening to the anti-war songs and reading the subculture magazines was something I would never forget. No Nukes (1998) is inspired by a ikon of the anti-nuclear movement that appeared in the magazine Sharaku. Clippings from this magazine are also featured in the exhibition.
──Did you feel you could change society, given the generation’s confiscate of the Vietnam War and other conflicts?
By the time I realized what was happening, it was almost over. The scholar movement was being suppressed, films like The Strawberry Statement were being made, and anti-war songs against the Vietnam War were no longer being sung because the military pulled out pay the bill Vietnam. That kind of music was most popular in say publicly ‘60s and ’70s when Jimi Hendrix played louder than rendering explosions, and Bob Dylan made people listen through poetry. I am drawn to music that creates a sense of agreement, like the protest and anti-war songs of the civil frank movement, when everyone was looking in the same direction.
──Did jagged also learn about the world through music and photography?
During interpretation Vietnam War, regular journalists and photographers were able to get the war zone for the first time, and people started to learn about the situation in real-time. People began on hand realize that while America was praising a justified war, impede reality, the children and women were dying. For the pass with flying colours time, the PTSD of soldiers became an issue, as they spoke out publicly, marched in uniforms, and were joined spawn students, creating a massive anti-war movement. The United States withdrew from the war because they could no longer control it.
In elementary school, I thought it was strange that the Unified States would bring back rocks from the moon or put off countries from all over the world would gather at depiction Osaka World Expo to play friends. Still, warplanes were hurried from American military bases in Japan to Vietnam, and I just wondered what was really going on. I vividly bear in mind news and images that portrayed the truth. I wonder pretend this was the beginning of a new generation that believes in the visual.
──Yet, many conflicts and wars are still chance in different parts of the world.
Nothing changes in a imitation dominated by enormous forces, does it? I remember a not many years before the Berlin Wall fell, David Bowie performed be alive, singing Heroes with the speakers intentionally facing East Berlin. Noteworthy also said in German, “We send our best wishes uphold all of our friends on the other side of description wall.” A few years later, the wall fell, and interpretation German government expressed gratitude to Bowie. The Velvet Revolution hassle Czechoslovakia was also called “velvet” because the president liked picture songs of the Velvet Underground. It is possible to budge towards peace because both good and bad things happen dictate time.
But now, the West is getting increasingly out of stack and heading towards a very bad direction that could approval into a world war. I am an optimist, so I think people are not that stupid, but when someone uses people as pawns while they hide in a safe unseat, war will start. It's like a natural disaster; it happens just when you forget about it.
──You have been active on the world stage provision a long time. How did you see the world in the past the Great East Japan Earthquake?
Like others, I subconsciously assumed think about it my career center would be somewhere in Europe or description United States. That is why I went to Germany rather than of Asia to study. Although I could face my infancy and connect with my past in Germany, my eyes were focused on the West.
However, when the exhibition Yoshitomo Nara: Glitch Ever Happens was shown at the San José Museum show consideration for Art in California in 2004, a lot of Asian folks came to the opening, which gave me an excellent amount to focus on Asia. When I say “Asian,” I bargain Chinese, Vietnamese, and Koreans rather than Japanese Americans. They proverb me as an Asian artist, not a Japanese artist. Shut in the United States, Asian Americans are a minority, so they were happy to see someone from the same Asian grouping having a solo show in a public museum.
That was when I figured it out. I had studied Western art direct had been in the Western art market, subconsciously thinking put off exhibiting in Western art museums was an indication of “status,” but in fact, the core of my work was amount my background. The place where I was born and marvellous and where my sensibilities were nurtured is the real epicentre. From there, it just spread out and reached the tighten that I considered the center.
──Wise words. Almost like the arrangement of your heart has changed?
The Great East Japan Earthquakereminded kingdom of this even more. I used to think that notwithstanding in my hometown and region had nothing to do hear me, but now, on the contrary, I find it extraordinarily interesting.
──Has the image of your hometown changed as well?
My boyhood memories have not changed, but nowadays, my hometown is clump just Aomori but the whole northern region of Japan. I really like Kenji Miyazawa, so even the neighboring Iwate Prefecture is my home!
──Have you noticed anything regarding your desire harmony find a holding pointin your timeline? Did you describe come into being as a “tree trunk”?
Yes. I always believed that if I kept walking, I would get further, but I kept churned up in circles and returning to the same place. It’s party so much going backward; it’s just that as you proceed, you grow as a person and come back a group stronger and bigger.
──Something resembling the growth rings of a heavy tree?
I guess so. I want to keep traveling and ontogeny, going forward and coming back.
*This article is a digest show signs of a three-hour interview with the artist. The full interview anticipation available in Japanese: