A Hasami ware porcelain plate reproducing Yoshitomo Nara's Let's Talk About "Glory" (2012), an acrylic-on-canvas painting where one of the artist's trademark children stares out with brow slightly furrowed and mouth set in a line that says she has heard what glory is and remains unconvinced.
The original work, measuring roughly life-size, belongs to the period following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, when Nara's palette softened, his paint layers multiplied, and the angry scowls of his earlier figures gave way to a different register: heavy-lidded, searching, charged. "I was so depressed that I couldn't help feeling that what I'd been doing was totally meaningless," he later recalled. When the brushes finally came back out, the defiant scowls had gone. What replaced them was a gaze that holds more weight precisely because it asks for less. No raised fist, no bared fangs — just a pair of eyes that have seen something and are still deciding what to make of it.
Like the rest of Nara's Hasami porcelain series, this plate is crafted in Nagasaki Prefecture, home to one of Japan's oldest ceramic traditions. Smooth and surprisingly heavy for its size, the body holds a print sharp enough to preserve the layered, almost translucent quality of Nara's post-2011 palette — the soft greens and muted flesh tones that replaced the flat, punchy colours of his earlier work.
The piece sits at a crossing Nara knows well: contemporary art and traditional Japanese craft. He explored a similar one when he produced mokuhanga woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e tradition with craftsman Yasu Shibata, a collaboration that began around 2010 and continued for over a decade. In both cases, Nara handed his imagery over to a centuries-old material process and let the medium reshape the meaning. A painting on canvas becomes something different when it travels onto a disc fired in a Nagasaki kiln — less a reproduction and more a translation, the way a poem shifts register between languages.
The face on this plate carries that tension without spelling it out. Twenty-two centimetres of Nagasaki porcelain, one unimpressed face, and a title that makes "glory" sound like something she has already outgrown.
For those curious about how Nara's work relates to movements like Superflat and the Japanese Neo Pop wave that also includes Takashi Murakami, our articles on Murakami's editions and limited print collecting offer a good starting point. And if the pull between innocence and gravity appeals, Roby Dwi Antono's prints and sculptures work a similar nerve: large-eyed figures that look like they wandered out of a children's book and into something far more complicated.
