YAYOI KUSAMA
My life is a dot
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among thousands of other dots.
THE PRINCESS OF POLKA DOTS Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and performer Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b.1929) is a famously provocative avant-garde artist, best known for her works featuring repeating motifs and psychedelic imagery. Yayoi Kusama’s life is a poignant testament to the healing power of art as well as a study in human resilience. Plagued by mental illness as a child, and thoroughly abused by a callous mother, the young artist persevered by using her hallucinations and personal obsessions as fodder for prolific artistic output in various disciplines. For Yayoi, artmaking became an essential survival mechanism. It was her sole tool for making sense of a world. This has informed a lifelong commitment to creativity at all costs despite the artist’s birth into a traditional, female-effacing Japanese culture and her career’s coming of age in the male dominated New York art scene. Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world. Today, Kusama reigns as one of the most unique and famous contemporary female artists, operating from her self-imposed home in a mental hospital. She has also been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.
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THE BIRTH OF A DOT OBSSESION She started to paint using polka dots and nets as repetitive motifs at around age ten, and created fantastic paintings in watercolors, pastels and oils. Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is sometimes called ‘the princess of polka dots'. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, she grew up as the youngest of four children in an affluent family. She loved drawing and painting and although her parents didn't want her to be an artist, she was determined. When her mum tore up her drawings, she made more. When she could not afford to buy art materials, she used mud and old sacks to make art. Eventually Yayoi Kusama persuaded her parents to let her go to art school and study painting. Yayoi trained at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. She was inspired, however, by American Abstract Impressionism. In the late 1950s she moved to New York as the most exciting art seemed to be happening there and was inspired by a letter she received from Georgia O’Keefe. It must have been 3
a bit frightening arriving in a big city with such a different
culture from what she knew. But she was determined to conquer New York. She later wrote about her feisty attitude: ‘I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot’. She had the first of many exhibitions there in 1959. She met and inspired important artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell, and her art was a part of exciting art developments such as pop art and minimalism. She was also one of the first artists to experiment with performance and action art. Her work inspired Pop artists, like Andy Warhol, Feminist artists, like Carolee Schneemann, Performance artists, like Yoko Ono, and contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst. Her familiarity with fighting for her life, and her compassion for others involved in causes against injustice, led Yayoi to associate with many subcultural movements of her time such as the hippie culture of the 1960s and the feminist movement. Yayoi also creates environments of dots so that we can experience this feeling of self-obliteration too. She calls these rooms her 'Infinity Rooms', and creates them by installing hundreds of flashing coloured LED lights into mirrored rooms. The pinpricks of light in the dark room reflect endlessly in the mirrors, making you feel like you are in an apparently endless space. The dots surround and engulf you…it's very hard to tell where you end and where the rest of the room begins!
Louis Vutton x Yayoi Kasuma 2012
My art originates from hallucinations only I can see.
WHAT’S WITH ALL THE DOTS? Don’t rub your eyes...because the dots you are seeing are art! Welcome to the weird, wonderful world of Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama tells the story of how when she was a little girl she had a hallucination that freaked her out. She was in a field of flowers when they all started talking to her! The heads of flowers were like dots that went on as far as she could see, and she felt as if she was disappearing or as she calls it ‘self-obliterating’ – into this field of endless dots. This weird experience influenced most of her later work. In much the same fashion as Yayoi uses art to process hallucinations, she also uses her work to confront personal phobias. When overcome with a nightmarish hallucination, she sits down at a canvas and document the visions by painting. By adding all-over marks and dots to her paintings, drawings, objects and clothes she feels as if she is making them (and herself) melt into, and become part of, the bigger universe. Yayoi believes that dots are a way to infinity. This most notably is seen in her Infinity Net paintings based on repetitive patterns and her installations in which she creates elaborate environments overrun with polka dots or tiny points of lights.
My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease.
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Obliteration Room 2002 − Present
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Dots Obssesion 2003
Infinity Mirrored Room 2016
I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland
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Infinity Mirrored Room 2016
COLOPHON Š 2018 all images, text and illustrations are copyright to their respective owners. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission of the publisher. Design: Sabrina Lam Printed in Canada by ECUAD – Vancouver The typefaces used are Arboria Black Arboria Book Abnormal Caecilia LT Std Roman Caecilia LT Std Bold
Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos.
I AM JUST ANOTHER DOT IN THE WORLD.