Art

Mirror image

Lea Cox reflects on Yayoi Kusama’s celebrated work, culminating in the Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibition now on in London

Calling Yayoi Kusama “art for the Instagram age”, as some are wont to do, somewhat undermines the 91-year-old Japanese artist’s six decades of trailblazing sculpture, installation, painting and conceptual art. Infinity Mirror Rooms – her unique vision of endless reflections, made for her 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern – is a dazzling visual triumph that translates across mediums, but it is an experience best enjoyed in person. It was due to open, alongside Chandelier of Grief, a boundless, blinking galaxy of spinning crystal chandeliers, at the London art gallery before Covid-19 put the world into lockdown – although it is still set to run until May 2021. It points at Kusama’s vision and remarkable talent that this work, created when she was in her ninth decade, has become her best-known work now she is in her tenth. The story of her career, from rural Japan to international fame, via the 1960s New York avant-garde scene, is as unique as her art. Raised in Matsumoto, a mountain city in the middle of Honshu, Japan’s main island, known for its 16th-century castle, Kusama trained at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts. She specialised in a traditional Japanese painting style, nihonga, typically made on washi (Japanese paper) or eginu (silk), using brushes. Kusama, however, felt hemmed in by the restraints of the ancient practice. Inspired by European and American avant-garde, particularly abstract impressionism in the US, which developed in the 1940s, and was advanced by the likes of Bernard and Harold Cohen, Sam Francis and Patrick Heron, she staged several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo in the 1950s. It was at this time she began to experiment with polka dots – recreated from the hallucinations she suffered as a child. Writing in 1968, she said: “Our Earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity.” She said that, during one vision, she 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.”

These dots, blots, polka-dots or infinity nets, as she called them, would become her signature style.

Kusama left Japan at 27 for New York City after establishing a pen-pal friendship with Georgia O’Keeffe, the artist known as the ‘mother of American modernism’, and quickly ingratiated herself into New York’s burgeoning avant-garde art scene, organising big-scale ‘happenings’ in the city tied up in the hippy and anti-war movement. There is an iconic picture of her posing with a horse, both covered in polka dots, in a piece titled Horse Play in Woodstock in New York in 1967; the most notorious event was the Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MoMA (1969), which took place at the Sculpture Garden of the New York gallery. It was during this time she came into contact and worked with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg.

Just seven years later, in ill health, Kusama returned to Japan, where she began to write surrealistic novels, short stories and poetry. After a brief

foray into art dealing (her business went bankrupt in 1977), she checked herself into Seiwa Hospital where she eventually took up permanent residence – and has been living, by choice, ever since. It says much of her longevity that by the 1980s and 1990s, Kusama, whose name had been forgotten in the West, became the subject of retrospectives. Slowly, through the written word, large-scale art installations and the lingering notoriety of her 1960s happenings, she became one of Japan’s best known and most celebrated contemporary artists, with a museum in her name opening in Tokyo in 2017. Her studio is a short distance from the hospital where she resides. “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,” she has said. Her best known works include Accumulation No. 1 (1962), her first sculpture – an armchair with scores of hand-sewn stuffed and painted protrusions on display at the MoMa; and her intricate, patterned Infinity Net paintings.

See the Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Rooms exhibition at Tate Modern (Until May 9, 2021)

The best new shows

Okwui Okpokwasili MoMA, New York City, dates TBC

Okwui Okpokwasili explores the roles of African and African-American women by creating multidisciplinary performance pieces that, according to the Museum of Modern Art, seek to shape the shared space inhabited by the audience and performer. Her experimental productions are created in collaboration with acclaimed designer Peter Born and bring together elements of dance, theatre and the visual arts. “I want to build full and rich characters with integrity, brown bodies labouring within a very specific and charged context,” she said. Okpokwasili inaugurates MoMA’s Studio Residency programme.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has hit art galleries and creative spaces hard. At the time of writing, there remains much uncertainty about when many galleries around the world will open again and what effect that will have on exhibitions that were scheduled for 2020 – and those planned for 2021. The following is our pick of what’s coming up at some of the world’s great art spaces – but, in most cases, details are yet to be confirmed.

Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life Guggenheim Museum Bilbao – until April 4, 2021 (TBC)

In an exhibition organised by the Tate Modern in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson shines a light on the modern world’s most urgent issues through 30 artworks created between 1990 and today. These include sculptures, photographs, paintings and installations – experiments with reflections and colours that are designed to challenge the way we navigate and perceive our environment.

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Turner’s Modern World Tate Britain, London – until March 7, 2021 (TBC)

This landmark exhibition will bring together major works by JMW Turner – perhaps Britain’s greatest ever artist – from across the globe. These include masterpieces such as The Fighting Temeraire (1839) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), pieces that reflect the country’s shifting landscape and societal upheaval caused by the industrial revolution. A must see.

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Furusiyya: The Art of Chivalry between East and West Louvre Abu Dhabi – until October 18, 2020

This exhibition explores the ancient roots of chivalry as well as the role of a knight in combat and the different chivalric codes that developed around the world, from Iraq and Syria to France and Spain. It is made up of more than 130 rare artworks from the 10th to 16th centuries, including arms, armour and rare manuscripts. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is open now – thermal scanning is in place on entry to the museum, as well as social distancing measures (2m).

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