Women of the Arts: Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama is a 94-year-old contemporary Japanese artist whose primary medium is sculpture and installation. She is also active in painting, performance, filmmaking, fashion, poetry and fiction among other arts. Her artistic language is a fusion of minimalism, surrealism, pop art, and abstract expressionism, embedded with profound autobiographical and psychological depth. Recognized as the world’s top-selling female artist and the most successful living artist, Kusama’s journey is as compelling as her diverse body of work.
Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, Japan by a family of rich merchants who owned a plant nursery and seed farm. Her love for drawing began at a young age when she would draw pictures of pumpkins in elementary school and create artwork inspired by the hallucinations she experienced as a child. Kusama’s childhood was a traumatic one. Recollecting her childhood, she reveals the painful dynamics within her family. Her father’s infidelity and engagement in extramarital affairs cast a shadow on her formative years. Her mother would often send her to spy on her father which instilled within her a lifelong contempt for sexuality. At the age of ten, she began to experience vivid hallucinations which she described as bright flashes of light or dense fields of dots. They also included flowers that spoke to Kusama, as well as patterns in fabric that came to life, multiplying and engulfing her. These hallucinations carried into her artistic process which she refers to as “self-obliteration”.
When she was thirteen, during World War II, Kusama was sent to work in a military factory, where she was tasked with sewing and fabricating parachutes for the Japanese army. She described this period as being in closed darkness, filled with the sound of air raids going off and the sights of American B-29s flying overhead. The events of the war greatly impacted her childhood and it was during this time that her appreciation for personal and creative freedom grew.
Post-war, she pursued art education at Kyoto City University of Arts, specializing in the traditional Japanese painting style, nihonga. In 1958, she relocated to New York City, becoming a key figure in the 1960s pop art movement. She came to public attention when she organised a series of happenings in which naked models were painted in vibrant polka dots.
During this time she began to create so-called soft sculptures in which she covered items such as ladders, shoes and chairs with white phallic protrusions. Eventually, she established a rhythm of productivity and managed to produce work in bulk. She also established other habits such as regularly appearing in public wearing her signature bob wigs and colourful, avant-garde fashions.
An incident occurred when Kusama displayed one of her pieces, a couch covered with phallus-like protrusions she had sewn, at an exhibit at the Green Gallery. Also in the same exhibition was a paper-mache sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. Despite this, Kusama’s piece received the most attention from attendees. By September of that same year, Oldenburg had started exhibiting his own pieces of soft sculpture, some of which were very similar to Kusama’s. A similar incident occurred when Kusama exhibited a boat she had covered in soft sculpture with photos of the boat completely covering the walls of the space. Andy Warhol had attended this exhibit and not long after, covered the walls of his own exhibit space with photos of a cow for which he had received significant attention. Since then, Kusama became very secretive about her studio work. It was most likely due to racism and sexism that gave male artists the audacity to appropriate her ideas and take credit for them, receiving recognition and praise that they did not deserve. In the face of adversity, Kusama continued to grow as an artist, eventually experimenting with room-size and freestanding installations, incorporating mirrors, lights and music. Her most notable project, one that I have attended myself, was her Narcissus Garden, which comprised hundreds of mirrored spheres outdoors. This constructed somewhat of an infinite reflective field that distorts and repeats the reflective images of visitors and the surrounding landscape.
In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan, where she encountered a less appreciative audience compared to the United States. The lack of recognition took a toll on her mental well-being, leading to a state of depression that hindered her ability to work. In a turn of events, Kusama’s mental suffering escalated to the point where she made a suicide attempt. After this, she found a doctor who specialised in using art therapy to treat mental illness, she checked herself in and eventually took up permanent residence in the hospital. She has lived there ever since, however, owns a private studio only a short distance from the hospital in Tokyo. From there, she continued to produce several pieces and even started a literary career, publishing several novels, a collection of poetry and an autobiography.
To this day, she continues to work in her studio every day and has contributed to a great deal of notable exhibitions. One of her installations which she made from 2000 to 2008 is called I’m Here, but Nothing which is simply a furnished room with a table and chairs, place settings, armchairs and rugs, however, the walls are covered in hundreds of fluorescent polka dots glowing in the UV light. In 2015-2016, the first retrospective exhibition in Scandinavia across four major museums in the region (Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Museum in Norway, Moderna Museet in Sweden and Helsinki Art Museum in Finland) opened. The show contained more than 100 of Kusama’s pieces and large-scale mirror room installations. It even displayed several early works that had not been shown to the public since their creation. Since then her artwork has continued to be relevant and is featured in many prominent museums around the world including The Hirshhorn Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the Perez Art Museum in Miami and the Yayoi Kusama Museum which opened in 2017.
