Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now
Art source of tranquillity for Yayoi Kusama
7 decades of artistry
While she initially trained in traditional painting, in 1957, an aspiring artist named Yayoi Kusama left her home country of Japan to immerse herself and hone her craft in New York’s avant-garde scene.
Finding early recognition in the Western art sphere, she returned to Japan in the 1970s, once again an unknown entity.
Persevering through mental illness and the struggles of fighting for the recognition of others, Kusama has since become a prolific Japanese contemporary artist.
Free expression and exploration
She is a perfect representation of the creative period that laid the foundation for her success, a living embodiment of the free expression and explorative nature at the heart of the avant-garde movement.
Throughout a career spanning more than seven decades, Kusama’s works have always returned to the same themes of infinity, accumulation, radical connectivity, the cosmos, and mortality.
Upon entering the expansive exhibition hall at M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District, visitors are met with a panorama of Yayoi Kusama’s.
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While much of her work reflects on grand philosophical concepts, Kusama also spent considerable time gazing inward.
Yayoi Kusama’s shifting experiences
Through the myriad self-portraits done in a variety of styles, you are given a glimpse into Kusama’s shifting psychological and emotional experiences over the years.
With her obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kusama used her art as an outlet and source of tranquillity.
Musings of infinity
As shown in her self-portraits, Kusama’s innate drive towards repetition is also evident in her more abstract pieces, as she explores musings on infinity.
Kusama’s examination of endless space began with her travels. Inspired by her experience viewing the Pacific Ocean from an airplane, Kusama started her Infinity Nets series.
Net series became a universe
When asked about it, the artist said, “My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe.”
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Monumental in size, the soft tones and endless loops create a sense of spatial depth. One painting in the series, her largest undertaking, became a beast she had to battle.
Created for a 1961 New York art exhibition, it was only when she finished the piece that Kusama realised it was too large for the wall it would be displayed on. Her solution was simple: cut it down to size.
Now, protected by an elongated glass display, a single cut strip is all that remains of the colossal work.
Grand-scale struggles
The surprising length of the leftover scrap suggests the grand scale of the original art. Initially struggling to sell her art in New York, Kusama lived on very modest means in the late 1950s.
At the time, she also suffered from overwhelming hallucinations. The repetitive act of painting her massive infinity nets, sometimes for up to fifty continuous hours at a time, was one way she was able to find calm in unsettling moments.
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Besides looped patterns that twirled endlessly, another pattern Kusama found herself drawn to time and again was polka dots.
In the early 1970s, she linked this bubbly imagery with a sense of universal oneness, stating, “When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment — part of the eternal — and we obliterate ourselves in love…”
This is especially highlighted in her not-so-subtly titled installation, Self-obliteration. Depicting the domestic scene of a dinner party, it is rendered otherworldly by the overwhelming presence of polka dots on every surface.
Varying in colour across mannequins and furniture, what is usually seen as separate and distinct blends into a peculiar cohesion.
Artistic self-destruction
Kusama firmly believed that the destruction of the self gave room for the possibility to reconnect with others and the world as equals. To her, the dots represented an accumulation of particles; all we were was one and the same.
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Kusama’s exploration of infinity included delving into the eerie horror and beauty of death and decay. Pondering the interconnectedness of all things, Kusama imagined death as an avenue of possibility for regeneration, a restart to all cycles.
Standing in stark contrast to her other portraits, Transmigration shocks and arrests the gaze with its neon hues and unnerving patterns.
Reminiscent of the glaze on an oil spill, the portrait was made in the year of the Fukushima nuclear accident. Electric green and navy-blue currents interweave over a bed of fluorescent pink.
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The title of the work hearkens back to the Buddhist concept of rebirth and reincarnation; even at the end of life, the universe goes on.
Besides her fascination with life and death, Kusama also used art to conquer her phobias.
During the early 1960s, in an evolving conversation with herself, Kusama made a series of increasingly phallic and absurd sculptures. These works, which became known as Accumulations, evoke natural growth.
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She found the process of making such works therapeutic, a way to confront her aversion to sex. In this series, soft, oblong sacs, shoes, and plastic grapes were attached to furniture and spray-painted silver.
Fear transformed
The “growths” that these protrusions represented overtake the armchairs and couches that they are attached to. By laboriously creating and affixing hundreds of objects onto such nondescript domestic forms, Kusama transformed her fears into humorous constructions.
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Understandably, the creation of these works required thorough, repetitive, and highly labour-intensive processes. While creating Accumulations, Kusama had to be hospitalised several times for mental and physical exhaustion.
A widely known fan of organic forms of expression, Kusama revelled in depicting controlled situations giving way to chaos.
Much like Self-obliteration and Accumulations, the monumental installation Shooting Stars takes an orderly form and subsumes it. A solid metal structure — wall-like in its enormity — curves gently.
But even with its authoritative stature, Shooting Stars is overtaken by a tangle of wild organic growth. Here, root-like stuffed tubers extend in a grid-like pattern from rows of individual units.
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This piece marks a shift in Kusama’s practice, with biological forms becoming a central component of her examination of the infinite.
Examining both the ephemeral and the disturbing, Kusama’s analysis of the natural order extended into more imaginative installations.
Comprised of almost one hundred mirror-finished floor sculptures, the embossed stainless steel that makes up her scenic Clouds is a calming collection of sleek, reflective blobs in various organic shapes and sizes.
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The natural forms of the piece give the impression of viewing clouds from above, enveloping the audience in a field of boundless reflection. Its minimalist design also stands in stark contrast to her other works, hypnotising the viewer with its natural motion.
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Bringing her audience back down to earth, Kusama evokes a moment of regeneration in a scene that could easily fit in with the macabre work of director Tim Burton.
Described as a forest of sculptural objects, The Moment of Regeneration gives the impression of the natural. What was usually green and brown is now blood-red with menacing black dots.
Tall, straight trees with strong protruding branches are transformed into bent forms, evoking more of a giant squid than dense foliage.
Examining the installation from different angles gives the eerie impression that the piece is moving with you — a fact not helped by the black dots of varying sizes neatly imprinted on the surface of each protrusion.
Having highlighted the standout elements of Kusama’s exhibition, a single article does not do her work justice.
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With over two hundred works featured in her retrospective at the M+ Museum, the Japanese talent invites the audience to delve into their favourite medium — be it paintings, sketches, sculptures or performances — and see the vast possibilities of our universe through her eyes.
From her early, harrowing portraits as a teenager growing up during World War Two to her abstract musings on balance and eternity, Kusama gives a physical presence to her metaphysical explorations. In doing so, she invites us to perceive the world in new ways.
Text & Photos Victoria Mae Martyn
