Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry and fiction. Her work relates to conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art and abstract expressionism, as well as being infused with autobiographical, psychological and sexual content. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) and Claes Oldenburg (1929 – 2022). She experienced a period in the 1970s during which her work was largely forgotten, but a revival of interest in the 1980s brought her art back into public view. Kusama has continued to create art in various museums around the world, from the 1950s through the 2020s and she’s now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world’s top-selling female artist, and the world’s most successful living artist. Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility which she leaves daily to walk to her nearby studio to work. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. ‘I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art’, she told an interviewer in 2012: ‘I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.’

Born in 1929 Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan. She began drawing pictures of pumpkins in elementary school and, at the age of ten, started to experience vivid hallucinations (described by her as ‘flashes of light, auras or dense fields of dots’). 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, a process which she has carried into her artistic career and which she calls ‘self-obliteration’. These fantastic visions can be said to be the origin of her artistic style, and laid the foundation for the works that would later define her career. She was also, 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: ‘My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbound universe, from my own position in it, with dots…’ (Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, translated by Ralph McCarthy, 2011).

Kusama studied traditional Japanese Nihonga painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948. Frustrated with this style she turned to European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo in the 1950s. Depicting abstract natural forms in water colour, gouache and oil paint she began covering surfaces —walls, floors, canvases and, later, household objects and naked assistants— with the polka dots that became a trademark of her work. The vast fields of polka dots, or ‘infinity nets’, as she called them, were taken directly from her hallucinations. The earliest recorded work in which she incorporated these dots is a drawing from 1939 in which the image of a Japanese woman in a kimono (presumed to be the artist’s mother) is covered, and obliterated, by spots. Her first series of large-scale (sometimes more than nine meters long) canvas paintings, Infinity Nets, were entirely covered in a sequence of nets and dots that alluded to hallucinatory visions. On her 1954 painting Flower (D.S.P.S), Kusama said:

One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space and be reduced to nothingness.

After destroying much of her early work Kusama left Japan for the United States, considering Japanese society ‘too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women’. In 1957 she came to Seattle where she stayed for a year before moving on to New York City, following correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986) in which she professed an interest in joining the limelight of the city, and sought O’Keeffe’s advice. Kusama embraced the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s and came to public attention regularly appearing in public wearing her signature bob wigs and colorful, avant-garde fashions. During her time in the United States, she also established her reputation as a leader in the avant-garde movement and received praise for her work from the anarchist art critic Sir Herbert Read DSO MC (1893 – 1968).

In June 1963, one of Kusama’s hand sewn soft sculpture pieces (a couch covered with phallus-like protrusions), was exhibited at the Green Gallery. Included in the same exhibition was also a papier-mâché sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. Kusama’s piece received the most attention from attendees and critics, and by September Oldenburg was exhibiting sewn soft sculpture, some pieces of which were very similar to Kusama’s (Oldenburg’s wife apologized to Kusama at the show). According to Fordham professor of art Midori Yamamura, Oldenburg likely was inspired by Kusama’s work to use sewn pieces himself, pieces which made him an ‘international star’. Kusama became depressed over the incident.

A similar incident occurred soon after when Kusama exhibited a boat she had covered in soft sculpture, with photographs of the boat completely covering the walls of the space. Andy Warhol remarked on the groundbreaking display, and not long after covered the walls of an exhibition space with photographic wallpaper depicting a cow, for which he drew significant attention. After this Kusama became very secretive about her studio work. 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.

During the following years Kusama was enormously productive and counted Donald Judd (1928 – 1994) and Joseph Cornell (1903 – 1972) among her friends and supporters. However, she did not profit financially from her work. Around this time, Kusama was hospitalized regularly from overwork, and O’Keeffe persuaded her own dealer Edith Herbert to purchase several works to help Kusama stave off financial hardship. Kusama was unable to earn the money she believed she deserved, and her frustration became so extreme that she attempted suicide.

The 1960s were also spent organizing outlandish happenings, in conspicuous spots like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, often involving nudity and designed to protest the Vietnam War. In one she wrote an open letter to Richard Nixon (1913 – 1994) offering to have sex with him if he would stop the Vietnam war. Between 1967 and 1969 she concentrated on performances held with the maximum publicity, usually involving Kusama painting polka dots on her nude performers, as in the Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MoMA (1969), in which performers were instructed to embrace each other while engaging the sculptures around them at the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art. 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 Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973), Alberto Giacometti (1901 – 1966) and Aristide Maillol (1861 – 1944).

In 1966, Kusama first participated in the Venice Biennale for its 33rd edition. Her Narcissus Garden comprised hundreds of mirrored spheres outdoors in what she called a ‘kinetic carpet’. As soon as the piece was installed on a lawn outside the Italian pavilion, Kusama, dressed in a golden kimono, began selling each individual sphere for 1,200 lire (US$2), until the Biennale organizers put an end to her enterprise. Narcissus Garden was as much about the promotion of the artist through the media as it was an opportunity to offer a critique of the mechanization and commodification of the art market. Gloria Sutton writes (in ‘Yayoi Kusama [1929]’, article for The Architectural Review, September 2021):

Her agitprop public performances during the 1960s and ’70s revealed the hypocrisy of a transactional art world that recoiled at the sight of the artist selling her mirrored orbs from her ‘Narcissus Garden’ directly to visitors to the 1966 Venice Biennale while standing next to a placard that read ‘your narcissism for sale’, skewering the commodity status of art. Her well-documented ‘Anatomic Explosions’ on the Brooklyn Bridge and other monuments in New York City featured nude figures that Kusama had dotted with red spots as a means of ‘reclaiming their alienated humanity’, burning the US flag to protest against the Vietnam War. By ceremoniously presiding over a gay wedding, depicting interracial relationships and centring women of colour, Kusama’s early happenings challenged prevailing heteronormative, white definitions of love and family.

Sutton refers to the happening (presided over by Kusama at the Church of Self-obliteration at 33 Walker Street, New York City in 1968) Homosexual Wedding. Apart from this Kusama also performed alongside Fleetwood at the Fillmore East in New York City, opened naked painting studios and a gay social club called the Kusama 'Omophile Kompany (kok). The nudity present in Kusama’s art and art protests was severely shameful for her family; her high school removed her name from its list of alumni. This made her feel alone, and she attempted suicide again.

During her time in New York, Kusama had a brief relationship with Donald Judd, after which she began a passionate, platonic relationship with the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell. She was 26 years his junior – they called each other daily, sketched each other, and he would send personalized collages to her. Their lengthy association lasted until his death in 1972.

In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan. She was in ill health, but continued to work, writing shockingly visceral and surrealistic novels, short stories, and poetry. She became so depressed she was unable to work and made another suicide attempt, then, in 1977, found a doctor who was using art therapy to treat mental illness in a hospital setting. She checked herself in and eventually took up permanent residence in the hospital. She has been living at the hospital ever since, by choice. Her studio, where she has continued to produce work since the mid-1970s, is a short distance from the hospital in Tokyo. Kusama is often quoted as saying: ‘If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.’ From this base, she has continued to produce artworks in a variety of media, with her painting style shifting to high-colored acrylics on canvas on an amped-up scale, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several novels, a poetry collection, and an autobiography.

Since 1963, Kusama has continued her legendary series of Mirror/Infinity rooms. In these complex infinity mirror installations, purpose-built rooms lined with mirrored glass contain scores of neon-colored balls, hanging at various heights above the viewer. 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.

Kusama’s work is in the collections of museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, USA; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and the City Museum of Art in her home town of Matsumoto entitled The Place for My Soul.

In 2017, a fifty-year retrospective of Kusama’s work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. That same year, the Yayoi Kusama Museum was inaugurated in Tokyo. Other major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (1998); the Whitney Museum, New York, USA (2012) and the Tate Modern, London (2012). In 2015, the website Artsy named Kusama one of its top 10 living artists of the year.

Kusama has received many awards, including the Asahi Prize (2001); Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003); the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Order of the Rising Sun (2006); and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. In October 2006, Kusama became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan’s highest honors for internationally recognized artists. She received the Person of Cultural Merit in 2009 and Ango awards in 2014. Kusama was also recognized as one of the Asia Game Changer awardees in 2023 by Asia Society for her actions that strengthened the bonds between Asia and the world.

Kusama’s work has performed strongly at auction: top prices for her work are for paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. As of 2012, her work has the highest turnover of any living woman artist. In November 2008, Christie’s, New York sold a 1959 white Infinity Net painting formerly owned by Donald Judd (1928 – 1994), No. 2, for US$5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist. Her Flame of Life – Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu) sold for US$960,000 at Art Basel/Hong Kong in May 2013, the highest price paid at the show. Kusama became the most expensive living female artist at auction when White No. 28 (1960) from her signature Infinity Nets series sold for $7.1 million at a 2014 Christie’s auction. In 2015, the website Artsy named Kusama one of its top 10 living artists of the year, and according to Hanna Schouwink of David Zwirner Gallery, speaking in 2018, Kusama is ‘officially the world’s most successful living artist’.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation