Yoshitomo Nara, “Smiling,” 2024. Urethane on bronze. Courtesy of the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York. Photo: Simon Klein
UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art
3333 Avenue of the Arts
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Yoshitomo Nara: I Don’t Want to Grow Up
May 28, 2025 – December 28, 2025
Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara is best known for his depictions of children—who appear across his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations—to convey the broad spectrum of human emotions. Reflecting the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self, his portraits capture the common condition of growing up—a space of defiance and menace, melancholy and anxiety, freedom and loneliness, through to joy and ecstasy.
I Don’t Want to Grow Up presents three new bronze sculptures on OCMA’s outdoor sculpture terrace: Smiling, Slender Eyes, and Basket Package (all 2024). Nara first created these large sculptures in clay as palm-size pieces before enlarging and casting the works in bronze.
In their transformed state, the malleable nature of the clay’s original material remains evident, enticing us to retrace Nara’s touch across the surface. Standing together like a group of friends, the sculptures emphasize the body as a site of both individual and collective life—a testament to how the imagination sets the body in motion.
I Don’t Want to Grow Up reminds us of what it feels like to move through the world, both embraced by and confronted with all the feelings of the human condition.
Image: Yoshitomo Nara, Smiling, 2024. Urethane on bronze. Courtesy of the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York. Photo: Simon Klein
