bozart.com>>>Yoshitomo Nara´s ashtray next>>>Though Nara’s figure-and-text drawing suggests manga and mixed emotions the deliberate lack of context discourage any easy narrative. Nara takes sweet images from childhood and infuses them with sharp-edged adult anxiety. The disproportion between subject matter and mood creates a unsettling effect. The combination, though, is extraordinarily satisfying. Nara’s work has an emotional quality which generates different memories and feelings on different viewers.

Yoshitomo Nara was born in Aomori, Japan in 1959. Nara is a part of a generation of young Japanese artists whose works are informed by Japanese popular culture, primarily manga (comics) and television animation. Recently his work has been included in the following group exhibitions: "Contemporary Drawings: Eight Propositions," MoMA QNS, Queens, New York, Superflat at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Art/Domestic: Temperature of the Time at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 1999; and The Manga Age at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 1998. Nara has had one person exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Santa Monica Museum, and the Yokohama Museum of Art.