An early representation of Nara’s strong stance against nuclear weapons, No Nukes is now synonymous with the antinuclear protest movement. Painted over a promotional poster for bossa nova musician Vinicius Cantuária’s Amor Brasileiro (1998) among other printed ephemera, in July 2012, it became a powerful symbol when the artist allowed protesters to download a high-resolution image of the work to use as picket signs during one of Japan’s largest antinuclear protests.

Nara’s work took a dramatic shift following the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which occurred only forty-three miles north of his studio. Emotionally affected by the aftermath, Nara painted In the Milky Lake/Thinking One, a portrait of a solemn-faced girl with closed eyelids who wears a green dress and is half-submerged in a barely visible pool of water; it was the only major painting he produced in 2011.

Presented at Nara’s first major survey exhibition, I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME., at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2001, Fountain of Life is a motorized sculptural installation of heads with closed eyelids that tower over one another inside an enormous teacup with water that streams down the figures’ cheeks, forming a fountain of tears. The melancholy of this work is palpable, and the figures’ clean profiles evoke the abstract richly outlined paintings of Japanese abstract painter, Morikazu Kumagai, whom Nara has long admired.

This painting depicts a girl with her enlarged head wrapped in bandages and her legs submerged under the surface of rippling water that echoes the bandages and haunting, bean-like eyes. The work was featured in his first major gallery exhibition in Tokyo in 1995 and appeared on the cover of Nara’s first book of paintings in 1997. It features a motif that recurs in many of Nara’s paintings and sculptures, inspired by the cover of folk singer John Hiatt’s album Overcoats (1975), which shows the singer half-submerged in water wearing his overcoat.

A recurring theme in Nara’s early practice is confrontations with violence. An allegory for one’s ill-fated future, in this painting, a girl with a knife in one hand and a flame ball in the other walks toward a cat as if giving it the option to choose between the two. Red smoke inscribed with “Nothing ever happens, nothing” billows from a ball of fire in the girl’s hand, and the phrase “The needle returns the first of the song and we will sing like before” is scribbled on a blackboard invoking the lyrics of Scottish rock band Del Amitri’s 1989 “Nothing Ever Happens.”

Yoshitomo Nara, Untitled, 2003, Graphite on paper, 16 1⁄2 × 23 5⁄8 in. (42 × 60 cm), Collection of the artist, © Yoshitomo Nara 2003, photo by Heather Rasmussen, courtesy of Pace Gallery and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo
 

In one of his many backpacking trips to Europe in the early 1980s, Nara frequented museums with art historical masterpieces but was also struck by early devotional sculptures, such as the twelfth-century Mother and Child from the Church of Santa Maria de Covet at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. Drawn to the Romanesque style in which accentuated facial features reflect strong devotion, he saw an affinity with Buddhist sculptures, where strength of devotion is proportional to the amount of stylistic deformation and presence.

In Nara’s earliest works made at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, allegories of good and evil collapse, and innocence becomes one with destruction itself. Compositions are divided in half or in quadrants, and figures with elongated heads wear halos, with their hands transforming into flames or knives. In People on the Cloud, a horizon line splits the composition—animals, people, and hybrid figures crawl along the outer edges of the frame. Nara masterfully situates the figures between symbolic and physical planes of the piece.