Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul

YAYOI KUSAMA

MY ETERNAL SOUL

Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul

草間 彌生

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Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul

Artist Profile ...................................................03 What Was Your Problem? ...................................................04 Yayoi Kusama’s Early Years ...................................................08 Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul 1

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Yayoi Kusama

She is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her

career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, soft sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic

cursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements.

Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content.

Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul

interest in psychedelic colors, repetition, and pattern. A pre-

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What was your problem?

Depersonalization. Everything I looked at became utterly remote.

Ms. Kusama, after many years of being viewed as a kind of heretic, you are finally gaining a central status in the history of postwar art. You are a magnificent outsider yet you played a crucial, pioneering role at a time when vital changes and innovations were taking place in the field of art.

During 1998–99 a major retrospective exhibition of your early work (“Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968”) toured major museums in the United States and Japan. How did you feel when you looked at your past works again?

Well... if I were not Kusama, I would say she is a good artist. I’d think she is outstanding.

How long did your hallucinations persist?

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I still have them.

Is your work a kind of art therapy?

It’s a self-therapy.

Did you have the same problem while in Japan?

Yes. When I was a child, my mother did not know I was sick. So she hit me, smacked me, for she thought I was saying crazy things. She abused me so badly—nowadays, she would be put in jail. She would lock me in a storehouse, without any meals, for as long as half a day. She had no knowledge of children’s mental illness.

Is it fair to say that you make your work in order to gain spiritual stability and release yourself from psychosomatic anxiety?

Yes. That is why I am not concerned with Surrealism, Pop Art, Minimal Art, or whatever. I am so absorbed in living my life.

I paint them in quantity; in doing so, I try to escape.You have also described the process as a

I was so desperate that I made my art during hallucinations. When I was studying Nihonga [Japanese-style painting that employs traditional gluebased mineral pigments] in Kyoto, I would go out in the rain to practice Zen, wearing only a t-shirt.

I would meditate in the mud in a heavy downpour, go home when the sun came out, and pour icy water over my head. I could not work otherwise.

Is the imagery of phallus-covered furniture related to your hallucinations?

It is not my hallucinations but my will.

Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul

I interpret your dot motifs as representing a hallucinatory vision. In your experience, just as attacks of depersonalization bring you a vision of fear, so do these dots. Proliferating dots append themselves to scenes around you. You attempt to flee from psychic obsession by choosing to paint the very vision of fear, from which one would ordinarily avert one’s eyes...

“self-obliteration” into a world suffused with dots. Salvation through self-obliteration.

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Yayoi Kusama’s Early Years

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do family in the mountainous region of Matsumoto in central Japan.

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Her family made their living from the cultivation of plant seeds; there is still a plant nursery on the site of Kusama’s childhood home. Hers was a conventional upbringing, and when Kusama began to express enthusiasm in making art, her family were not wholly supportive of her interest. Her mother in particular discouraged her young daughter’s dreams of becoming a professional artist, trying to steer her instead towards a conventional path of traditional Japanese housewife. But Kusama’s persistence was strong. When her mother tore her drawings away from her, Kusama made more.

When she could not afford to buy art supplies, she foraged in the house to find suitable materials with which to work. Some of the early paintings in the Tate Modern exhibition were made using jute sacking as a support.

Kusama’s early artistic ambitions were curtailed not only by her family. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, she, like other school-age children in her hometown, was called upon to work for up to twelve hours a day in a parachute factory. Despite this punishing work, she managed to find the time and the resources to continue drawing. An early notebook in the exhibition features page after page of beautifully detailed sketches of peonies made at this time.

Kusama began publicly exhibiting her work in group exhibitions in her teens and in 1948, after the War’s end, Kusama convinced her parents to allow her to go to Kyoto to study painting in the Japanese modernist Nihonga style. She continued her studies in Kamakura City but soon grew tired of the conventional approaches of her teachers. Her great ambition and talent were recognised when she began staging solo exhibitions in her home town in the early 1950s.

Your family was a matriarchy, with your mother at the center.

She turned the entire household into her own castle.

Her children had no meaning other than as existences subordinate to hers.

She was smart and very strong. She was also good at painting and calligraphy. She was a valedictorian at her school. My father was dominated by her, which he disliked. He customarily went out, he was absent at home Yet he was a very kind father.

Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul

Kusama’s achievement as a woman artist, coming as she did from a traditional background in a conservative part of Japan in the early part of the twentieth century, cannot be underestimated. It was her own unwavering drive and confidence in her talent that enabled her to forge her extraordinary career from such humble beginnings.

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