By Kimberly Chun

TOKYO ARTIST YOSHITOMO Nara's kids are so cute when they're mad.

And if they could talk back to the viewer, they'd probably respond with a resounding "Grrr. I'll show you cute. Stop the war. Punk's not dead."

At first glance, that appears to be the operative dynamic between the observer and Nara's comic book children and canines at "Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens," the first Bay Area retrospective of the artist's work, now on display at the San Jose Museum of Art. But there's so much more going on below the sleek, fiberglass, seemingly brush stroke-free surfaces of his work than simply that kid-beats-dog, dog-eats-dog paradigm. Bedecking giant platelike surfaces, poised on tree stumps, poking from the walls like Noh masks, these alternately angry-eyed and beatific kids and dogs are emissaries of perpetual resistance. Like Sprout the Ambassador's child, who simultaneously offers a clover – an olive branch? – and turns away with a slight sneer, the images look simple and effortless while chafing against easy dismissal. The exhibit may break down into reductive categories of "Flat," "Pop," "Cute," and "Punk," but it also simmers with a submerged historicism that references both Ukiyoe wood-block prints and Little Lulu, Speed Racer and Odile Redon, Social Distortion and Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her. Nothing ever happens, all right – that's just tradition pounding at the door, and Nara's supposedly helpless infants are armed with a direct gaze and weapons you can't see (Knife behind Back).

Speaking of social distortion, you should probably know Nara by his merch: the T-shirts, stuffed animals, postcards, and ashtrays (for sale at Urban Outfitters). He's another pop star in the age of mechanical reproduction; yet the actual paintings, sculptures, and doodles are startling to see in their own fantastic, plastic, happily artificial universe. They're the antithesis of flesh, and they're unnaturally big, even monumental.

One can barely get face to face with the acrylic, fabric, and wood Light My Fire girl propped up to more than six feet high. And yes, call it a girl – despite what Nara said about the gender neutrality of his kids ("They're all self-portraits") in his recent museum talk. It sports a Louise Brooks bob and a julep-green dress and holds out a fiery citrus orb like a sexy, baby Prometheus.

The fiberglass Pavlov dog of a sculpture, I Think, Therefore I Am ... a Dog, should be cushioned by AstroTurf or something equally faux and fab. A bone dangles over the placid canine's head, which protrudes halfway out of the wall. Thinking has nothing to do it, that witty Descartes student Nara seems to say. With his eyes wide shut, the dog seems peaceful, oblivious, and almost Buddha-like in his serenity – even when he stands on all fours as the enormous fiberglass Your Dog sculpture, tail up and erect, nose tumescent and bright red, looking fully prepared to sire another factory-order litter of decorative figurines or bookends. Green eyes open, as in the painting, Pale Mountain Dog, Nara's dog seems sly, knowing, and fully conscious and confrontational, just like the wrathful, fully aware little girls around him.

What are these critters so angry about? What are they rebelling against? What have you got? Some observers might point to Nara's guilty recollections of abandoning his dog as a child. Still others reach for Nara's musical inspirations – the soundtrack to his isolated days as a latchkey kid in northern Japan, one that today consists of new and old punk including NOFX, Sleater-Kinney, the Ramones, Green Day, Nirvana, the Clash, Sum 41, and the White Stripes. Selections by Eminem, Neil Young, and Gram Parsons stick out as musical aberrations, though like the sketched girls who yelp "Fuck!," they all embody an attitude that goes back beyond punk and rock 'n' roll to rage against a Japanese homeland that pounds down every nail that stands up and delicately forbids pubic hair from even the most ultraviolent and outrageous manga or hentai (anime porn). Reams of academic papers can be written about how manga artists draw their way around censorship – and they probably have. In the same mode, Nara's sketches bust out of their scrap paper surfaces, emphasizing the gesture that's subsumed in the paintings, while his characters scrap for a fight and rail against war, ride airships, and stomp on skulls, always threatening to blot out the hotel letterhead. Nara plays with allusions to Keane kids (giving them devouring maws instead of eyes), Kitagawa Utamaro, Walt Disney, Stanley Kubrick, and especially Phillip Guston's smoking, bug-eyed heads (and by extension Bay Area underground comics).

In conversation, the seemingly shy and giggly artist perked up noticeably when he fielded a question about his technique, going into the layers of color beneath the surface of his paintings, the careful constellation of greens. In many ways, the giant acrylic, cotton, and plastic saucers – which depict saucer-eyed children with seemingly helpless pawlike limbs, little hospital gown-like shifts, or floppy long sleeves that mimic a kimono's – are his most powerful statements. Less explicit and topical than the drawings, they're iconic transmitters of Nara's not-quite-superflat aesthetic, at slight, subtle odds – resist! – with Takashi Murakami's de facto mission statement for his generation of pop-inspired Japanese artists. Though Nara's figures generally embrace flat, cartoon dimensions in one sense, their world is concave, like a lens or a satellite dish. It's tempting to file them, somehow, into the Japanese tradition of ceramics – they're like the teddy bear treats at the bottom of your bowl, only they glower, smoke, and behave badly, bleeding from their little baby arms – but perhaps their Franklin Mint green background, their eyes, and even their clovers of uneasy peace transmit a different message: you will reckon with us.

'Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens' runs through Oct. 31, San Jose Museum of Art, 110 South Market, San Jose. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Free. (408) 294-2787, www.sanjosemuseumofart.org.