Japan’s Angry Little Girls, Yoshitomo Nara’s Angry Little Girls
Chelsea Schieder
Yoshitomo Nara, "Slash with a Knife" book cover, Little More 1998
"The classroom is a sea of blood…" was the only way the teacher could explain the scene to which one of her little students had led her. That was after the girl had burst in upon her sixth-grade class as they were eating lunch. Drenched in red she announced: "The blood is not mine."
The blood was, instead, that of her friend, whom she had lured away from the rest of the class into an empty room in the school, then slashed her arms and throat with a box cutter. The girl left in an ambulance, with no hope for revival.
Reading the account of that event in the newspapers last June, the image that visited me–haunted me even–was that of Yoshitomo Nara’s little girls in pastel-colored dresses clutching blades and glaring angrily with pupil-less green eyes.
Nara is a Japanese artist. However, his expatriate inclination towards studying and working in America and Europe, as well as his trendy popularity in those places, distances him from his homeland. In Japan, his appeal seems more limited and more cultish. A fan website devoted entirely to him (www.happyhour.jp) is both exhaustive and slightly disquieting; it even lists the store at which Nara prefers to purchase his underwear (Uniqlo, apparently). He still shows at small, intimate galleries around Japan, which draw small, intimate crowds. One such show was "Shallow Puddles" at Graf Media, in a seedy area of Osaka. The soft colors and subtly angry girls characteristic of Nara were all there, every piece well balanced and the larger pieces all deceptively detailed and finely crafted.
But that anger that seems to bubble just under the limpid eyelashes of some of his washed-out girls troubles me. Nara has left Japan behind, in many senses, and has embraced the world outside of Japan more than most Japanese ever could, but are these girls expatriates, too? Or are they Japanese girls whose stilted anger still dog a Japanese artist no matter where he goes?
Last June, it wasn’t only the violent grade-school murder that made me sick over the day’s news. Buried further back was a small bit on another sixth-grade girl who had thrown herself to her death from her apartment building after leaving a suicide note upon her desk. There are indeed angry little girls here.
Nara’s first solo exhibition in the United States finished its tour at the Contemporary Museum Honolulu, and the San Jose Museum of Art website interprets his work as, "deceptively simple paintings, sculptures and drawings that invite us to reconnect with the defiant spirit that comes with youthful optimism and the belief that we may someday be able to change the world." The title of the exhibition, however, is "Nothing Even Happens," which suggests a far less empowered view of life. Viewed in the context of bright, boisterous young girls, Nara’s art may indeed remind of us what it felt like to have a youthful, defiant spirit. Or it may remind us of what it felt like to be too youthful and powerless to express that spirit and be taken seriously.
Nara’s 1998 book, Slash with a Knife addresses most perfectly, eerily, the themes of frustrated rage that last year’s events suggest live on in the psyches of some Japanese girls. Images of knife-wielding, fist-shaking girls abound, accompanied by slogans such as, "Declaration of war for Yourself!" and "Silent Violence." Quieter figures are there, too, under such titles as "sorry, just not big enough" and "I was ten years old, couldn’t do anything." While Nara’s work seems to long for childlike simplicity in its style, it also recognizes the limits and impotence of youth.
New York can see some of Nara’s works in a group exhibit at the Japan Society Gallery, running until July 24, 2005 (333 East 47tth Street New York, NY 10017 (212) 832-1155). The show is called "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture." The title is interesting, inasmuch as Nara is not a little boy, and channels his artistic messages through little girls. As he claims, little girls and dogs are the things he happens to be able to draw, or it may be because of all the powerless, little girls are the most powerless: little girls have little outlet for their anger, and even less possibility of having their anger taken seriously.
