Yoshitomo Nara, Japanese, born 1959, oil painting on canvas depicting a portrait of a young girl with a lotus, 1998. Signed and dated, on the backside. Framed. Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist, known for Mod child figurative, animal. Yoshitomo Nara was born in 1959 in Hirosaki, Japan and has exhibited extensively in the United States as well as Japan and European countries. Using a style combining the effect of Japanese prints and Pop Art cartoons, he paints solitary, doll-like children to comment upon the decline of society, East and West. To Nara, children symbolize a world marked by confusion and anxiety about an unknown future. Since 1988, he has divided his time between Japan and Germany, where he studied art. He sees himself as a voluntary exile. Because art schools and museums were conservative in Japan, Nara, also a sculptor working in a similarly simplistic style, studied contemporary art on his own there as a young man, eventually seeking exhibitions abroad. One of a kind artwork.