Look past the cutesy kawaii aesthetic and you see that Yoshitomo Nara’s work is inherently political
She has an oversized head like a toddler with huge, expansive eyes and dark hair. She is looking at you, sometimes angry, sometimes sweet, sometimes violent. But she is always adorable. This is Yoshitomo Nara’s infamous “Big Headed Girl”: usually painted on large canvases, some as big as five-feet tall, the Japanese artist’s magnum opus has recently found a second life on nailbeds around the world. Nail artists are not only replicating the character and motifs in mere millimetres, but expanding on Nara’s work in different forms of colour, mediums and politics.
The Nara girl has seen a surge in popularity recently. “Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lake)”, a piece not seen in public for 20 years was auctioned from Sotheby’s for £9 million in March, while searches for “Nara Yoshitomo” have quadrupled in the past five years according to Google Trends. An exhibit of the artist’s work titled “My Imperfect Self” at the BLUM Gallery in Los Angeles earlier this year helped bring a whole new (and younger) audience to his work, while an upcoming exhibition in London’s Southbank Centre is sure to do the same in the UK. Nara’s work has never been more prominent in the West, and using nails as their canvas, nail artists are interpreting his work in their own ways.
Nail artist Léa Lepers worked as a graphic designer before a trip to Japan set her free and reminded her to go back to what she liked doing when she was a kid – nails. Taking inspiration from Japanese maximalism and pop culture, the French nail artist brings Nara’s work to life on press-on sets using watercolor pencils. “I select pieces he has made that had a great impact on me, like the burning house and ‘No more war,’” she says. “I wanted to have the same powerful impact that he has through a childish art style.”
To create the nails, after curing a nude gel base, Lepers adds a matte coat to create a texture similar to paper that allows the colour pencils she uses later to better grip the surface. She then pairs Nara’s famous motifs – the burning house, his love of music, his pacifist calls, and of course his big-headed girl – with brilliant pops of colour. “I really wanted to use pencils to represent the handmade and childish way of drawing,” she explains. Finally, she seals everything using another matte coat to amplify the texture of the pencils.
Since the pandemic, there has been a mass cultural return to the aesthetic of cuteness: think Marc Jacob’s Heaven, Starface’s collaborations with Hello Kitty, Drain Gang’s Bladee’s obsession with plushies, and the cutesy character tattoos you see all over your feeds. According to toy industry research group Circana, one in five toys are bought by and for adult use. From Sonny Angels to Miffy to Jellycats, there’s been one toy craze after another, and these characters have become popular motifs for nail art. Compared to some of her cutesy peers, Nara’s girls represent a wider range of girlhood – a term that has been brought to the forefront of culture during a political era of terminating women’s rights. She isn’t just cute, but can be downright menacing, holding a knife while looking pissy at the audience.
Look past the cutesy kawaii aesthetic, and you see that Nara’s work is inherently political. Raised with the ghost of war in Northern Japan, his school was repurposed from military army barracks and his childhood home was located near an American military base. In 2002, FOIL magazine sent Nara to photograph Afghanistan for their inaugural “No War” edition and the trip had a profound effect on him. The Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 was another turning point, he has said, with his political stance becoming increasingly overt in his artworks. Recurring motifs including “stop the bomb” and “no war” are messages that really resonate with audiences of today. How can they not with ongoing violence including the Russia-Ukraine War, Syrian Civil War, Myanmar Civil War, India-Pakistan stand-off, conflicts in Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia, and the genocide against Palestinians.
This call against war is what drew Los Angeles-based nail artist Michelle Won to Nara. “[His work] is important today with everything going on with Palestine and Gaza,” she says. “The way that our government in the United States spends [its] money is completely garbage, trash.”
Won’s set took four hours to complete. After applying her different coloured pastel base coats, she faintly painted the rough outlines of the characters and words using an extremely worn-out discontinued brush from Nail Labo with four hairs left on it. With a liner brush, she filled in the words and began painting the Nara girl’s face and body. Then she brought in colour: a soft blush to the girl’s face, a cunty orange bob. She painstakingly took the same ragged brush as before to outline the figures yet again. Barely using any pressure, she layered thin lines to achieve a sketched effect, similar to the original artist’s creations. Finally, after curing, she sealed it in with a top coat.
Ultimately, the revival of the famed petulant girl is here to stay on our fingertips, whether as a pacifist political statement or as sweet grit in the face of oppression. So take it and do it your way with fine line brushes, markers, colour pencils, 3D gel, prints, stickers, and more. The Big Headed Girls are for us all.