Don't call me cute

Small children wreak destruction in Yoshitomo Nara's paintings, exploding conventions with a rage inspired by natural disaster, the Ramones and the bomb

- By Stuart Jeffries

Japan's most expensive painting is a knife crime waiting to happen. In Yoshitomo Nara's canvas, which Sotheby's sold for $25m in 2019, a little girl with a conservative side parting and Peter Pan collar is staring down the viewer with unflinching green eyes.

Her gaze is as withering as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and her eyes follow you as inescapably as Lord Kitchener's in the first world war recruitment poster. But Nara's painting, Knife Behind Back (2000), is more upsetting than either of those. Most chilling is what we don't see; it's all about the power of titular suggestion.

This nameless girl - sadly not included in the Hayward Gallery in London's bracing new retrospective of the 65-year-old punk artist - is a variation on a theme that Nara has been developing in his paintings since art school in the 1990s. Inspired by both Japanese kawaii (cute) and Disney twee, his cherubic, cartoonish figures with oversized heads resemble psychotic Kewpie dolls. "People refer to them as portraits of girls or children," says curator Mika Yoshitake. "But they're really all, I think, self-portraits." In an interview for the Hayward's exhibition catalogue, Nara confirms this: "When I paint I always think the canvas is like a mirror." These little girls with big heads and bug eyes are a sexagenarian male working out his demons.

Nara's characters have become as iconic as Warhol's Marilyns or Lichtenstein's blond bombshells, and just as marketable as posters, T-shirts and coasters. But that was hardly Nara's intention in painting them. "I kind of see the children among other, bigger, bad people all around them, who are holding bigger knives," he says.