“I continue to use my past experiences as a filter to explore my present self.” —Yoshitomo Nara

On June 10, 2025, the curtains slowly rose at the Hayward Gallery, signaling a long-overdue fulfillment: Yoshitomo Nara, one of Japan's most recognizable names in contemporary art, made his first full-scale appearance in a British public institution. The eponymous retrospective, which runs until August 31, features over 150 works spanning the 1980s to the present day, offering viewers a deep glimpse into the artist's inner world.

Multi-dimensional slices: "Self-anatomy" of forty years of creation
The exhibition hall is deliberately designed to create a sense of wandering: the wall of punk records that has accompanied Nara since he was 9 years old serves as a prologue, and the vinyl covers of folk, blues, rock and soul music are like colorful tree rings, marking the first ray of Western radio waves he caught from the radio in the small town of Aomori. Juxtaposed with it are charcoal sketches from the 1980s - the lines are naive but sharp, foreshadowing the prototypes of those "big-eyed boys" later; and the huge oil painting "Silent Listener", which was recently completed in 2024, responds to global anxiety with a sudden touch of scarlet on a cold gray background.

The exhibition uses media as the warp and weft to string together the complete spectrum of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and ceramics:
- The cracks in the early wood carving “Little Pilgrim” still reveal the loneliness during the period of studying in Germany;
- The 3-meter-high installation “Dog from Your Memory” uses galvanized steel plates to form a whimpering dog with its head down, but inside is a miniature house – a 1:20 replica of Nara’s studio in Cologne, Germany;
- A group of Aomori earth-fired ceramics that have never been made public. The cracks on the glaze look very much like ice marks in the permafrost season. It is his "local experiment" after returning to his hometown in recent years.

The “London Increment” of the touring exhibition: double exposure of memory and the present
As an extension of the joint touring exhibition of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Fried Burda Museum Baden-Baden, the London station has specially added a “Wrinkle in Time” unit: a light box wall composed of daily photographs personally selected by Nara. The subjects range from wandering musicians on the streets of Cologne in the 1980s to the empty Tokyo subway during the 2020 epidemic. Like negatives gradually emerging from the developing solution, they form an intertextual relationship with the loneliness in the works.

Curator Yung Ma emphasized in the preview tour: “Nara’s ‘iconic’ does not lie in the repetition of symbols, but in how he makes these symbols become containers of memory – when you stand in front of ‘Miss Moonlight’, you see not only a cartoon girl holding a dagger, but also the placard held high by the brother in the anti-war march in the 1960s, and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ coming from the radio when the Berlin Wall fell.”

Music as invisible curator
The flow of the exhibition is guided by a hidden auditory thread: the label next to each work is not the year of creation, but the song that Nara was playing on loop at the time - from Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" to The Ramones' "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg". In the vinyl listening room at the end of the exhibition hall, visitors can put on headphones and watch the painting of the same name amid the guitar distortion of "No War". The thick knife marks of the paint and the noise of the guitar strumming resonate at the nerve endings. As Nara said: "Music is the metronome of my creation, and painting is the reverberation of prolonged notes."

From Aomori to the World: A Rebel’s Gentle Resistance
Yoshitomo Nara’s story begins in a small town in the northernmost part of Japan: under the shadow of the Cold War, the radio waves of the US military radio station crossed the strait, opening up another dimension for the young Nara. His creations always carry this "border man" perspective - when studying in Germany, he used a pencil to draw the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall; during his residency in New York, he used acrylic to paint anti-war slogans on old sheets; after returning to Aomori, he began to use local red clay to burn "angry puppies", and the fingerprints faintly visible under the glaze became a declaration against industrial reproduction.

This kind of resistance is not a grand narrative, but a childlike stubbornness: in a sketch from the 1990s in the exhibition, a little girl holds a bomb but closes her eyes, with a moth resting on her eyelashes. Nara said: "I want the viewer to realize that vulnerability itself is a kind of strength."

When art becomes a refuge for memory
At the end of the preview, 78-year-old Yoshitomo Nara stood alone in front of "Midnight Truth" - the girl in the painting raised her head, and a cloud-covered moon was reflected in her pupils. When asked why he chose the UK as the venue for his first solo exhibition in a public institution, he looked at the dome of the exhibition hall: "Because there are people here who read Keats on the subway and sing "We Shall Overcome" during strike marches. Memory needs resonance, just like an isolated island needs an echo."

Exhibition information
Yoshitomo Nara's eponymous retrospective exhibition
Exhibition period: June 10 - August 31, 2025
Location: Hayward Gallery, London