"...I have come to yearn for my childhood when I would cry out loud, laugh, and leap as I wished. They were emotions that I had almost forgotten in my stages of becoming an adult. This realisation allowed me to re-evaluate my most important values. Perhaps, by making works with children as the subject matter, I am projecting my wish not to forget to be – not a ‘selfish child’ but – ‘like a child’." —Yoshitomo Nara
Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s works have made their distinctive mark on the international art scene for his use of deceptively simple colours, flattened graphic composition, and his signature childlike characters that simultaneously appear innocent yet malevolent.
Pissed Off! is one of the strong examples of Nara’s compositions which juxtapose the seemingly innocent drawings of children with an aggressive posture, sometimes brandishing a knife or revealing a mouthful of sharp teeth — an imagery renowned within the artist’s visual lexicon. Often Nara's drawings of children show off their individual personalities with various emotional complexities. Pissed Off! evidently shows a very aggravated young girl, the speech bubbles flying from her suggest a barrage of snarky remarks aimed at the perpetrator. The faces and body language of these characters demonstrate a strong sense of independence, self-identity, even as to evoke rebelliousness. Nara hints that these aggressions are a kind of necessary self defense: "Look at them, they (the weapons) are so small, like toys. Do you think they (the children) could fight with those? I don’t think so. Rather, I kind of see the children among other, bigger, bad people all around them, who are holding bigger knives."
