"I Don't Mind, If You Forget Me" is the rather bold title of Yoshitomo Nara's current exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art. But Nara can easily feign indifference, knowing full well that his warped yet archetypal children will have the opposite effect on viewers. With their enlarged heads and bean-shaped eyes, they simultaneously seduce us and disturb us.

Works by Yoshitomo Nara, 2001"Little Ramona""Another Girl Another World"My Blackguard Angel""Fountain of Life"
Yokohama Museum of Art photo

A statement on the last page of the exhibition catalog completes the title and confirms Nara's intentions: "I don't mind if you forget me. Because you never forget me. I never forget you."

After studying at Musashino Art University and Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Nara left Japan in 1988 to study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Duesseldorf, under the guidance of German contemporary artist A.R. Penck. His prolific output, which included cover art for the band Shonen Knife and author Banana Yoshimoto, gradually created a buzz on the Japanese art scene.

Now back in Tokyo, Nara can be called one of Japan's most popular contemporary artists, especially among young people, who can be seen wearing T-shirts and watches imprinted with his peculiarly innocent yet sinister children.

Yet his widespread popularity, both at home and abroad, stems more from just clever marketing. Straddling the line between fine artist and illustrator, Nara is able to present complex ideas in simple packages. On first glance, his creations look like cute comic-book characters with mutated Hello Kitty heads, but unlike those kawaii characters, Nara's peer into a deep gulf of existential despair.

His easily approachable style conjures up associations with Pop Art, manga culture and a fairy-tale land, disrupted by horror-film elements. The mix obviously appeals to young generations who vacillate between lost innocence and rebellion, particularly young Japanese, who feel emotionally trapped in a still-rigid society.

In an interview with the art magazine Inova, Nara explained his connection with a generation "who can't articulate or don't want to articulate their feelings. . . . This is all very specific to the audience in Japan. They don't see my work as 'Ooh, it's so cute.' It's more 'I get it, I understand it.' "

Despite his street-cred, Nara is only now finding mainstream recognition at the age of 41. While he has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Yokohama exhibition is his first major show at a Japanese museum. And the works on display here represent only a fraction of his range; primarily a painter and illustrator, he has also designed everything from snow domes to parkas.

"I Don't Mind, If You Forget Me" inhabits five partitioned sections, while the installation "Time of My Life" displays 93 drawings -- on everything from loose-leaf paper to postcards -- taped up in seemingly random fashion in a specially built enclosed space. Some drawings are accompanied with text ("Already we have no future but we have to create," "I am bad, bad bullet boy," "fade away," "Earth, Moon") that partly enhances and partly clashes with the images. With many of the drawings resembling rough sketches, the viewer is left to play with associations in this void of disparate elements.

There is a familiarity here -- whether it is the universal appeal of children or certain subculture themes -- that draws in the viewer. This is at odds with Nara's depictions of alienation, visions of cruelty and an ever-present potential for violence.

Similarly, Nara's paintings exude a feeling of satisfied completeness, yet at close inspection one is confronted with their fragmentary nature: They are painted upon numerous scraps of silk that have been pasted one atop another. However, these fragments make up the enigmatic blank backgrounds that serve as playgrounds for the children and give them an unearthly appearance. The children seem to be floating, like passengers from another world, yet express earthly aggressiveness and vulnerability. There is, for example, the piece "Slight Fever," which depicts a helpless-looking girl covering her bleeding arm, or the piece "Ready to Scout," in which another girl, with a slightly wicked expression, is about to crawl out of a hole. These children seem to reflect every child's raw fear of being abandoned and put forth a different perspective of a world that deviates from adult rationality.

Already upon entering the exhibition one feels overwhelmed by the lonely and melancholic atmosphere that is created by Nara's work. It is the acute estrangement of childhood, but it could also have originated in the loneliness Nara felt during his study and development while living abroad.

Nara believes that most of adults' opinions and perspectives can be traced back to their childhoods and that the past is stuck in our minds as an invariable constant. In Nara's works, he not only addresses his own childhood experiences but, by natural extension, our own memories.

Such is the theme of childhood explored and played with in the installation "Your Childhood," which directly addresses the viewer and succeeds in erasing the gap between artwork and audience. Facing a row of stuffed dolls we see the words "your childhood" reflected in a mirror (the actual phrase is displayed backward on the opposing wall). We are forced to confront ourselves and our memories of that impressionable age.

The dolls sitting in front of the mirror resemble the children of Nara's paintings. The eyes of some are closed, as if they are seemingly drifting away into a dream world; others, with razor-blade eyes peer intently at the viewer. Here we face our own childhoods, our memories, our dreams . . . In turn, the dolls scrutinize us, seemingly blaming us for what we have become. Yet who is to blame who? Do we blame the children for their sinisterness or do they blame us grownups for creating a world where maliciousness belongs to the daily survival kit?