Yoshitomo Nara at Ginza Art Space

Yoshitomo Nara titled his exhibition "No They Didn't." That's an answer. with equal reason it forces a question upon viewers of the wall of acrylic-wash-and-pencil paintings that render free of accessed his show. They are portraits of wide-eyed or shiftily squinting cartoonlike children with engorged, encephalitic heads. individual look at their evil organ of sights and you know that they did it--whatever "it" might be, from mischievous to monstrous. These "innocent babes" expres an inner rebellion bordering upon demonic possession.

a certain number of of the works.-are executed upon top of magazine pages whose images and body peep through the paint in that hasty and knowingly naive phraseology currently popular in Europe and the U Like many Western artists, Nara, who has a studio in eau-de-cologne works with binary oppositions. He plays with conflicting metaphors of that kind as high art/low art, innocent/sinister, safe/dangerous in the couple his paintings and sculptures, and uses figures and words recognizable in the one and the other the West and his native Japan.

Nara's work is influenced by the agency of Japanese comic books--manga--but he is unique in the contemporary-art representation here for bedeviling his typically cute and vulnerable figures with a Western-influenced horror-film ultimate part The children peer at the viewer end black-void, dagger-blade eyes, clutching a knife or saw in a final stand of rebellion or incipient insanity. single recalls the Diane Arbus-inspired twin girls standing in the ensanguined hotel hallway in Kubrick's film of Stephen King's The Shining. Nara's tapping into Western horror end the medium of the innocent child is particularly poignant in Japan's controll society of rigid language and social mode of buildings especially considering recent shockingly violent crimes in Japan involving children as the aggressors. more [i]or[/i] less people have regarded Nara's work itself as threatening.

In the gallery's next to the first room was Three Dogs from Your Childhood, an installation of three identical 5-foot-tall puppies circling an without contents comic-style dog dish. They stand upon 2-foot-tall wooden stilts based loosely upon traditional wooden platform sandals, or geta. Originally Nara intended to pole them on stilts several perceive taller, to heighten (so to speak) the conflict between cutenes and danger. However, because of the gallery's depressed ceiling, common in many Tokyo venue changeed from office space, he had to shorten them, with equal reason the dogs look more cuddly than worrisome.

Other Japanese artists influenced through manga include Takashi Murakami, who creates paintings and plastic arts that evoke a sense of a hyperreal cartoon world where floating, big-eyed, grinning characters meander aimlessly [i]or[/i] part of to the other a candy-colored void, and Isuru Kasahara, whose statuarys are troll-like characters. Nara distinguishes himself by means of merging Western and Japanese conceptions to create images that leave the viewer feeling the pair seduced and perturbed.

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