Nara uses his signature “bandage” technique, which he began in the mid-1990s, where he builds the surface up with strips of cotton to create a textured background, which is mounted on FRP board. A girl with pointy bangs and green eyes is submerged so far underwater that only her eyes, nose, and forehead are visible. The rounded structure of the dish-shaped canvas adds to the illusion of depth—as if one is witnessing the drowning of a figure who seems to be in a simultaneous condition of anger and passivity.

While confronting the 2011 nuclear disaster, Nara made Miss Spring (2012), a portrait of a wide-eyed girl with a high forehead who stands against a cherry-blossom pink background and stares straight at the viewer, with prism-like teardrops glistening in her eyes. A symbol of hope, this portrait served as the cover image for Ryūichi Sakamoto’s No Nukes 2012: Guidebook for Our Future. Miss Spring was used as a powerful backdrop banner by the protest organizers during the demonstrations.

In 2005 Nara moved into a beautiful studio that overlooks the green pastures in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, where he would eventually open N’s YARD, a space that houses his artwork and collection. The paintings he began making in this period are layered in a vast array of palettes that create a kaleidoscopic effect, with many works featuring different colored eyes. The backgrounds are often dark and thickly layered, with iridescent colors that float in and out of sight, evoking the existential effects of Mark Rothko’s soft, saturated forms.

Starting in 2005, Nara’s singular portraits began to take a dramatic turn, each projecting a complex expression that combines sadness, anger, and serenity. In Missing in Action – Girl Meets Boy, fire from an atomic bomb explosion is reflected in one of the eyes of the figure, representing a memory of Hiroshima, where this work is housed. The political valence of this work on paper connects the fading memory of the previous generation who experienced the war with the younger generation of Japanese youth who can only experience this decisive moment indirectly.

Nara began creating portable installations of his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, which ranged from the three-part installation S.M.L. (2003) to the epic twenty-six-installation exhibition A to Z (2006), in 2003. These domestic environments culminated in My Drawing Room, a painted wooden architectural structure that recreates Nara’s studio space.

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.”