Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, a small, rural, traditionalist Japanese village in Nagano Prefecture. Known internationally and to the general public for her repetitive use of polka dots, the result of visual hallucinations that the artist started having since the age of ten, and for her site-specific work capable of evoking infinite spaces, she has distinguished herself as a multidisciplinary and avant-garde artist since the 1960s, ranging from painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, installation, fashion, publishing and writing in a variety of styles, approaching Minimalism, Pop Art, Performance Art, Land Art, Art Brut and Psychedelism without identifying herself with any of these movements, but rather constantly reinventing her style. “People may call me otherwise, but I consider myself a heretic of the art world”, Kusama claims.
She is the youngest of four children of an upper-class Japanese family with conservative values, working in the cultivation and trade of seeds, storage and real estate, a lifestyle from which Kusama feels estranged. The strict family hindered the artist in her creative expressions since she was a child, even taking away her tools for painting and drawing and forbidding her to study art: an unbearable situation for Kusama, who repeatedly describes herself as an obsessive artist.
I create art for the healing of all humanity.
In trying to steer her towards the more conventional path of a traditional Japanese housewife, her mother violently obstructed Kusama’s dream of becoming a professional artist, while her father was hardly around, distracted by his numerous extramarital affairs. After the Pearl Harbor attack and the outbreak of World War II, like other school children in her town, she was called to work up to twelve hours a day in a parachute factory, but despite the punishing work she managed to find the time and resources to keep on drawing.
She began exhibiting her work publicly in group exhibitions as a teenager and in 1948, after the end of the war, she convinced her parents to allow her to study painting at Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts, specialising in the Japanese modern style of Nihonga. She continued her studies in the city of Kamakura, but soon got tired of the conventional approach of her teachers, and only saw her talent recognised in the early 1950s, when she started staging solo exhibitions in her home town.
One day, entering a bookshop, she discovered the art of Georgia O’ Keeffe; fascinated by her paintings, she decided to write her a letter. O’Keeffe replied to that letter, advising her to go to New York and show her work to as many people as possible. Motivated by this suggestion and in the light of the painful family conflict and the suffocating environment that repressed her desire to become an artist, Kusama decided to move to the United States in 1957. She first headed to Seattle where she briefly exhibited twenty-six works at Zoë Dusanne’s gallery, before settling in New York. Upon her arrival in the city, at the age of twenty-seven, she only had a few hundred dollars and a suitcase full of kimonos with which she was convinced she could earn a living, but before long, as a woman and Japanese, she realized the city’s establishment was hostile to her – as can be seen in her work Walking Piece (1966), a series of photographs in which she walks alone through the streets of New York dressed in a kimono, challenging the sexist, male-dominated, Eurocentric society.
Despite the many difficulties she had in supporting herself financially, Kusama’s timing in travelling overseas was formidable: at that time the city was beginning to establish itself worldwide as an art capital, starting with the then dominant Action Painting and, from the 1960s, with Pop Art and Minimalism. One of the first steps towards becoming recognised was her meeting with Edith Halpert, an art dealer who had previously launched top artists at the Downtown Gallery, including O’Keeffe herself, who had decided to back the young Japanese woman by buying one of her works.
In October 1959, Obsessional Monochrome, Kusama’s first solo exhibition in New York, opened at the Brata Gallery, where she presented her Infinity Nets, large canvases on whose surface the artist painted a net composed of dense paint strokes that formed a perforated mesh and anticipated the minimalist and monochrome paintings that would become very successful a few years later. About the Infinity Nets, Kusama states: “By putting together the individual quantum particles, negatives of almost imperceptible droplets that made up the meshes of a net, I aspired to predict the infinity of space, to measure it from the point of view of where I was standing”.
People may call me otherwise, but I consider myself a heretic of the art world.
From this moment on, the poetics of the artist experienced different forms of expression, without ever abandoning the idea of the infinite net and exploring the physical and psychological boundaries of painting. She became a key figure in the New York avant-garde and exhibited her work alongside that of Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, artists she knew and who were influenced by her; the young Judd, as an art critic, reviewed her work and, as reported by Kusama, was the first to acquire one of her works in New York for $200, paying for it in four instalments.
In works such as Air Mail Stickers (1962), a large canvas covered with hundreds of red, white and blue airmail stickers, a sensibility closer to Pop Art started emerging, finding full expression in the sculptural language. The Infinity Nets begun to expand in space, beyond the canvas, onto tables and chairs, transforming and sexualising everyday objects that took on the name of Soft Sculptures. The first work of this kind is entitled Accumulation No. 1 (1962) and consists of an armchair covered with dozens of stuffed, hand-painted fabric protrusions. Kusama defines this action as a form of compulsive art-therapy, capable of counteracting her phobic attitude towards sexuality: “the armchair thickly covered with phalluses is my psychosomatic work. I make them and I make them and then I keep on making them, until I erase myself in the process”, explains the artist. Confined by those forms that are frightening to her, she manages to exorcise the fear, stemming from her repressive upbringing.
The following year, in December 1963, at the Gertrude Stein Gallery Warhol’s gaze was captured by Kusama’s installation Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, a ten-metre long boat covered entirely in white padded phalluses, accompanied by nine hundred and ninety-nine black and white photographs of the same boat, reproduced several times on the ceiling and walls of the gallery, in full “Pop Art spirit”. The choice to involve the walls also anticipated the installations that were to appear shortly after and that would mark Kusama’s fortune in the decades that followed. This is the case of installations such as Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli’s Field (1965), a mirror room filled with padded fabric protrusions covered in red polka dots, in which the young Kusama also appeared, dressed in a red jumpsuit, and Love Forever (1966-1994), an installation composed of intermittent electric lights, “there are serial patterns of red lights fading in and out while white lights are going on and off. It makes you dizzy”, says the artist.
There are serial patterns of red lights fading in and out while white lights are going on and off. It makes you dizzy
About the same time, starting in 1965, she staged a number of unauthorised happenings that attracted the attention of the press, marked by a social and political consciousness influenced by the hippie movement, focused on a return to nature, a freer sexuality and pacifist thinking against the war in Vietnam. Sex Happening and Body Festivals were born (1967-1971) in which violence was countered with activism. These performances staged naked bodies in public with the declared intention of dismantling the boundaries of identity, sexuality and the body, boundaries that she herself was confronted with as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese in the Western art world and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessive symptoms.
Kusama’s first performance involving naked dancers took place on 15 October 1968 in front of the New York Stock Exchange. “The money earned from this institution is allowing the war to continue. We protest against this cruel and greedy instrument of the war establishment”, Kusama declared. Occasionally causing police intervention and some arrests, unauthorised demonstrations took place in numerous other symbolic places of American culture: in front of the Statue of Liberty, in Central Park in front of the statue of Alice in Wonderland and in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Kusama painted dots on the bodies of the participants in a performance in the fountain (Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead, 1969), ending up in the New York Daily News.
In 1966 came her controversial (and unauthorised) participation in the 33rd Venice Biennale where in front of the Italian Pavilion she exhibited Narcissus Garden, a work composed of one thousand five hundred mirrored silver plastic spheres (paid for by her friend Lucio Fontana, due to Kusama’s limited economic resources) that covered a green area set up with signs engraved with the words “Narcissus Garden, Kusama” and “Your narcissism for Sale”.
The spheres were sold on the opening day of the kermesse by Kusama herself for around 1,200 lire each, with the intent of criticising the commercial soul of the art world and stimulating reflection on self-perception.
By putting together the individual quantum particles, negatives of almost imperceptible droplets that made up the meshes of a net, I aspired to predict the infinity of space, to measure it from the point of view of where I was standing.
In addition to producing paintings, drawings, sculptures, happenings and installations, in the 1960s Kusama also made a number of films – Self-Obliteration (1967) received international recognition and awards – and extended her art to the world of fashion, creating fabrics and clothes featuring stitched flowers and phalluses, and starting up editorial collaborations. In 1969 she opened her boutique “Kusama Enterprises”, a shop selling clothes, bags and even cars with an aesthetic of its own, marked by a free use of polka dots and repeated dense motifs to create a sense of infinity, recalling the patterns of the Infinity Nets.
Despite her success in 1973 Kusama, due to her obsessive-compulsive neurosis, decided to return to Japan. Detaching herself from the Western art world, she entered a psychiatric hospital in 1977, where she still lives and works today (it is alleged that she moved there voluntarily, but she claims otherwise). In the years that followed she continued to produce art, adding poetry and fiction to her range of creative activities – The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street (1984), Between Heaven and Earth (1988) and Violet Obsession (1998). In Japan, her poetics took on a more structured formal appearance through the combination of different forms, using totally new materials in order to make the works more durable.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Kusama officially achieved international fame. In 1993, she represented the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where she presented numerous works including the installation Mirror Room (Pumpkin) (1991), a dazzling orange mirror room with black dots, which housed the iconic pumpkins, the artist’s alter ego. From these experiences, the Infinity Mirrored Rooms, immersive installations usually consisting of a mirror room with hundreds of coloured lights and reflections, became a global phenomenon between the 2000s and 2010s.
In works such as Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with Brilliance of Life (2011), Chandelier of Grief (2016-18) or Obliteration Room (2002-2012), LED lights, crystal chandeliers or polka-dot stickers were endlessly repeated, fragmenting the visitors’ body and creating an effect of incessant repetition, translating the obsessive motifs of the early works into physical reality. These installations came to the attention of the general public on the occasion of the major retrospective exhibitions dedicated to the artist in international museums such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Her rise to international fame is also due to several partnerships with creative industries, such as the one with Peter Gabriel of Genesis in 1994 for the song Lovetown, in which her obsessions end up in the hypertrophic world of the song’s video clip. Moreover, in 2012, the artist went beyond her usual languages, designing not only an entire capsule collection with Louis Vuitton, on the invitation of Marc Jacobs, but the very interior layout of the New York boutique that hosted the special project (presented on 5th Avenue, in conjunction in tandem with her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum). “The most beautiful fashion boutiques I have seen in the last 20 years were made by her”, says Italo Rota (Domus, no. 1014, June 2017). From clothing to a line of handbags and small leather goods to displays and window design, Kusama created objects and components with bright colours and macro textures: flowers, polka dots, pumpkins and rigorously dotted neural connections, iconographies typical of her more mature work.
In October 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo, in the district of Shinjuku near her studio and the psychiatric hospital where she lives, housing her permanent collection as well as some immersive installations. Although Kusama is now in her nineties, she works almost every day. Among her plans for the future, there is only one wish: to make art until the day she dies. “I create art for the healing of all humanity”.
Opening image: Yayoi Kusama sitting in front of his works – Tate Modern, 2012