Yayoi Kusama
Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts for a year in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga.
[5] Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly coloured polka dots.
[11] Born into a family of merchants who owned a plant nursery and seed farm,[12] Kusama began drawing pictures of pumpkins in elementary school and created artwork she saw from hallucinations, works of which would later define her career.
[12] The artist says that her mother would often send her to spy on her father's extramarital affairs, which instilled within her a lifelong contempt for sexuality, particularly the male's lower body and the phallus: "I don't like sex.
[17] These hallucinations included flowers that spoke to Kusama, and patterns in fabric that she stared at coming to life, multiplying, and engulfing or expunging her,[18] a process which she has carried into her artistic career and which she calls "self-obliteration".
[13] She was reportedly fascinated by the smooth white stones covering the bed of the river near her family home, which she cites as another of the seminal influences behind her lasting fixation on dots.
[1] Discussing her time in the factory, she says that she spent her adolescence "in closed darkness" although she could always hear the air-raid alerts going off and see American B-29s flying overhead in broad daylight.
[21] Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo in the 1950s.
The earliest recorded work in which she incorporated these dots was a drawing in 1939 at age 10, in which the image of a Japanese woman in a kimono, presumed to be the artist's mother, is covered and obliterated by spots.
[3] Helaine Posner, of the Neuberger Museum of Art, said it was likely some combination of racism and sexism that kept Kusama, who was creating work of equal importance to men who were using her ideas and taking the credit for them, from getting the same kinds of backing.
Standing inside on a small platform, an observer sees light repeatedly reflected off the mirrored surfaces to create the illusion of a never-ending space.
[13] In the 1960s, Kusama organized outlandish happenings in conspicuous spots like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, often involving nudity and designed to protest the Vietnam War.
[31] During the unannounced event, eight performers under Kusama's direction removed their clothing, stepped nude into a fountain, and assumed poses mimicking the nearby sculptures by Picasso, Giacometti, and Maillol.
As soon as the piece was installed on a lawn outside the Italian pavilion, Kusama, dressed in a golden kimono,[24] began selling each individual sphere for 1,200 lire (US$2), until the Biennale organizers put an end to her enterprise.
[3] Her organically abstract paintings of one or two colors (the Infinity Nets series), which she began upon arriving in New York, garnered comparisons to the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.
[44] The 2.5-meter-wide "Pumpkin," made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, was installed in 1994 on a pier on Naoshima, Kagawa, becoming iconic as the artist's profile grew in the following decades;[45] it was reinstalled in 2022 after being destroyed by a typhoon a year earlier.
[46] Kusama's later installation I'm Here, but Nothing (2000–2008) is a simply furnished room consisting of table and chairs, place settings and bottles, armchairs and rugs, however its walls are tattooed with hundreds of fluorescent polka dots glowing in the UV light.
[47] The multi-part floating work Guidepost to the New Space, a series of rounded "humps" in fire-engine red with white polka dots, was displayed in Pandanus Lake.
Perhaps one of Kusama's most notorious works, various versions of Narcissus Garden have been presented worldwide venues including Le Consortium, Dijon, 2000; Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2003; as part of the Whitney Biennial in Central Park, New York in 2004; and at the Jardin de Tuileries in Paris, 2010.
These typically involve a cube-shaped room lined in mirrors, with water on the floor and flickering lights; these features suggest a pattern of life and death.
"[59] In November 2021,[60] a monumental exhibition offering an overview of Kusama's main creative periods over the past 70 years, with some 200 works and four Infinity Rooms (unique mirror installations) debuted in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
[65] Claire Voon has described one of Kusama's mirror exhibits as being able to "transport you to quiet cosmos, to a lonely labyrinth of pulsing light, or to what could be the enveloping innards of a leviathan with the measles".
[74] In 1991, Kusama starred in the film Tokyo Decadence, written and directed by Ryū Murakami, and in 1993, she collaborated with British musician Peter Gabriel on an installation in Yokohama.
[78] That same year, she worked with Marc Jacobs (who visited her studio in Japan in 2006) on a line of Louis Vuitton products,[79] including leather goods, ready-to-wear, accessories, shoes, watches, and jewelry.
Between 1983 and 1990, she finished the novels The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street (1983), The Burning of St Mark's Church (1985), Between Heaven and Earth (1988), Woodstock Phallus Cutter (1988), Aching Chandelier (1989), Double Suicide at Sakuragazuka (1989), and Angels in Cape Cod (1990), alongside several issues of the magazine S&M Sniper in collaboration with photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.
[21] Her most recent writing endeavor includes her autobiography Infinity Net[83] published in 2003 that depicts her life from growing up in Japan, her departure to the United States, and her return to her home country, where she now resides.
[84][85][86] To date, Kusama has completed several major outdoor sculptural commissions, mostly in the form of brightly hued monstrous plants and flowers, for public and private institutions including Pumpkin (1994) for the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art; The Visionary Flowers (2002) for the Matsumoto City Museum of Art; Tsumari in Bloom (2003) for Matsudai Station, Niigata; Tulipes de Shangri-La (2003) for Euralille in Lille, France; Red Pumpkin (2006) for Naoshima Town, Kagawa;[87] Hello, Anyang with Love (2007) for Pyeonghwa Park (now referred as World Cup Park), Anyang; and The Hymn of Life: Tulips (2007) for the Beverly Gardens Park in Los Angeles.
[89] In 2010, Kusama designed a Town Sneaker styled bus, which she titled Mizutama Ranbu (Wild Polka Dot Dance) and whose route travels through her hometown of Matsumoto.
Coinciding with an exhibition of the artist's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, a 120-foot (37 m) reproduction of Kusama's painting Yellow Trees (1994) covered a condominium building under construction in New York's Meatpacking District.
[141] In comparison, the highest price for a sculpture from her New York years is £72,500 (US$147,687), fetched by the 1965 wool, pasta, paint and hanger assemblage Golden Macaroni Jacket at Sotheby's London in October 2007.
