Nara's Record Collection

Installation photograph, Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021, art © Yoshitomo Nara, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Music has been a passion for Nara since he began to listen to folk songs at age nine. The artist’s vast record collection, including folk, rock, blues, soul, and punk albums, is a testament to his great admiration for album cover art; as he has said, “Album covers were the first things that spoke to me as works of visual art. For me, having been brought up in a rural area where there were no museums, this was my very first art experience.” Nara’s love of music provided him with an unorthodox art education: the images on record covers not only became signifiers for music but also introduced him to a vast array of artistic genres, with covers and their corresponding music merging in his subconscious. For the young Nara, growing up in Japan in the shadows of war and economic recovery, the records and their covers served as sources of escape and, eventually, as a valuable form of self-empowerment rooted in the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. They allowed him to deal with the complexities of living with the remnants of Japan’s imperial past and in close proximity to signs of ongoing conflict.