Spotlight On: Yayoi Kusama

I paint polka dots on the bodies of people, and with those polka dots, the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe.

-          Yayoi Kusama, “Infinity Nets : The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama”

Figure 1

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is responsible for some of the most iconic works of sculpture in the world. Throughout Kusama’s prolific career her favourite motifs of pumpkins, polka dots and nets formed of infinitely repeating loops have taken the shape of room-filling installations, performance pieces, painting, poetry and large and small sculpture. Her self-described ‘obsessional art’ aided her as a lifeline through childhood trauma and struggles with mental health. The will to create always triumphed.

Figure 2

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a city a few hundred miles from Tokyo. Her family owned a plant nursery and as a child she experienced vibrant visions of speaking flowers and fabric multiplying, inspiration for her famous infinity nets design. However, Kusama’s home life was troubled, with an unfaithful father and a mother who ripped the young Kusama’s art away from her, instead pushing her to follow convention and take up the role of a housewife.[1] These hardships were amplified by the backdrop of World War II, requiring a teenage Kusama to work twelve-hour days in a parachute factory.

Painting and drawing became her sole focus and in her early life Kusama had already begun to exhibit pieces in group shows. After the end of the war the artist convinced her parents to allow her to pursue her passion and in 1948, she began studies at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts. Here, Kusama studied the Japanese painting form of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Nihonga. Throughout the 1950’s Kusama exhibited her work in 6 solo shows throughout Japan.[2]

Figure 3

In the early day of her career as an artist Kusama wrote to one of her inspirations, Georgia O’Keefe, who advised her to travel to the United States.[3] Inspired by American Abstract Expressionism Kusama moved to Ney York City in 1958 with dollar bills sewed into her kimono.[4] She was one of the first Japanese artists of her generation to make this move and became an eccentric public persona, staging many provocative happenings involving body painting, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations.[5] Her work soon caught the attention of the New York avant-garde scene and praise from artists such as Donald Judd and Eva Hesse.[6]

It was here in New York Kusama began making her Accumulation soft sculptures: objects she covered in phallic fabric tubers. Upon finding the labour of creating such works taxing, Kusama began to utilise mirrors to expand her environments into hallucinations beyond the physical realm. Works like Phalli’ s Field demonstrate this breakthrough from installation to participatory experiences, involving each visitor as the subject of their own unique infinity. These paintings, sculptures and environments provided the backdrop to a bold series of photographed self-portraits, showing Kusama reclining, despondent, upon her works.[7]

Figure 4

In 1966, rising from the depths of a severe depressive episode, Kusama carried out a remarkable staging of her work Narcissus Garden at the 33rd Venice Biennale. Although her work was sanctioned, the artist had not been invited to represent any country at the Biennale and instead she installed the fifteen hundred mirrored plastic balls outdoors in the exhibition grounds. Dressed in a gold kimono Kusama hawked the silver spheres for $2 each to passing visitors, embracing and challenging the consumeristic art world.

Further, Kusama’s call to participation through her reflective surfaces and her performance challenged definitions of fine art. The work prompted famed critic Hilton Kramer to state that the 33rd Biennale had exacerbated the ‘state of decay’ present in contemporary art.[8] Ahead of the curve, this new mode of sculpture demonstrated Kusama’s conception of her work as a dynamic being, an interconnected and modulating system. Later, in 1993 Kusama’s famous yellow pumpkins filled the Japanese pavilion, as the artist was formally invited to represent Japan for the 45th Venice Biennale.[9] 

Figure 5

An iconic form in Kusama’s practice, the pumpkin is further explored in her large open-air sculptures which she began making in 1994. Covered in spots and sometimes bored through with holes and coated in mirrors, Kusama’s pumpkins stand as if having grown right out of the ground and evoke the sensation of a child-like wonder. The artist first came across a pumpkin at age 11 with her grandfather. She recalls that when she tried to pick it, the vegetable began speaking to her as though it were a man’s head. A painting the young artist made of a pumpkin later won her a prize.[10] Devastatingly, one of these pumpkin sculptures, part of the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, was recently washed out to sea during a typhoon.

Figure 6

It was not until later in her life that Kusama achieved the level of international fame, recognition and mass adoration she carries today as the world’s biggest-selling female artist and recipient of numerous honours and awards. Now age 92, for the last 45 years Kusama has lived in a psychiatric hospital, whilst continuing to make art from her studio across the road.[11]

In recent times, the fame of Kusama’s immersive environments has exploded in the online spheres of social media. Infinity rooms like The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away allow visitors to watch themselves stand as if amid a galaxy. A transient encounter, a momentary glimpse at limitless space, Kusama continues her exploration of life and endings. Whether in the reflection of a mirror ball, the loop of net or against a celestial backdrop of spangled stars Kusama gives her audience a moment of contemplation. In her works we feel the slow passage of time, the progression of existence and the big world beyond.

Written and researched by Amy Thomson de Zylva BA (Hons)

Learn More

To continue exploring Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, check out the Hirshhorn museum website here.

Read about the recent disaster in which Yellow Pumpkin was swept to sea in this article.

Watch a short work by Argentinian director Martín Rietti from a visit to Kusama in her studio.

Or, watch one of Kusama’s interactive rooms become covered in polka dots.

Image Captions

Figure 1 Infinity Mirrored Room: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins 2016, courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Figure 2 Yayoi Kusama, courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Figure 3 Yayoi Kusama with Infinity Mirror Room : Phalli’s FIeld, as part of her exhibition “Floor Show” at Castellane Gallery in 1965, courtesy of WikiArt. 

Figures 4 Narcissus Garden at Inhotim in Brazil, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 5 Yellow Pumpkin 1994 (before it’s recent damage), courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Figure 6 Infinity Room : Fireflies on the Water  at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2002, courtesy of Flickr Commons.

 Footnotes

1.       Holland Cotter, “Vivid Hallucinations From a Fragile Life,” The New York Times, July 12, 2012, sec. Arts.

2.       “Biography | Yayoi Kusama,” accessed September, 2021.

3.       Cath Pound, “Yayoi Kusama’s Extraordinary Survival Story,” accessed September, 2021.

4.       The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, “The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation,” accessed September, 2021.

5.       “Biography,” accessed September, 2021.

6.       “Yayoi Kusama,” accessed September, 2021.

7.       “Infinity Mirror Rooms | Hirshhorn Museum,” accessed September 9, 2021.

8.       Marin R Sullivan, “Reflective Acts and Mirrored Images: Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden,” History of Photography 39, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 405–23.

9.       “Biography | Yayoi Kusama,” accessed September, 2021.

10.   The Guardian, “Yayoi Kusama: The World’s Favourite Artist?,” September, 2018.

11.   Pound, “Kusama’s Extraordinary Survival Story,” accessed September, 2021.