Yayoi Kusama has created an estimated 50,000 works during a career spanning half a century, is feted in her native Japan and in the US — yet in Britain she remains relatively unknown. Kusama turned 80 in March, but when we meet at her Tokyo studio, she is a vision in a bobbed, blood red wig and a red one-piece dress covered in her beloved polka dots.
It is impossible to discuss Kusama’s work without making mention of those dots and the omnipresent lined meshed patterns she calls “infinity nets.” They appeared in her early paintings, on “living” installations comprising her own naked torso and those of her friends, and, more recently, wrapped around tree trunks in Singapore. Later this month, trees along the River Thames will also be given the polka-dot treatment, as part of a collaborative exhibition with nine other artists at central London’s Hayward Gallery.
The motifs first came to Kusama in childhood. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in the Japanese Alps, she started seeing a psychiatrist at the age of 10 after she became gripped by visions of dots, nets and violet flowers that covered everything she saw. “I call them my repetitive vision,” she says. “I still see them. [They] cover the canvas and grow on to the floor, the ceiling, chairs and tables. Then the polka dots move to the body, on to my clothes and into my spirit. It is an obsession.”
Hers was an unhappy childhood. “Not a single day went by that my mother didn’t regret giving birth to me,” she says. “She was the only daughter of a wealthy family, so my father, as the son-in-law, was able to lead an extravagant lifestyle. He ended up having an affair with a geisha and deserted us to be with her in Tokyo. It damaged my mother. I was stuck in the middle of a long-running feud and I felt mentally cornered. That’s why I started hallucinating. I started seeing a psychiatrist, and it was he who first encouraged me to develop as an artist.”
She studied, against her mother’s wishes, at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, and by 1950 had moved from traditional Japanese painting to abstract natural forms. In her most fevered periods, in her 20s, she was producing dozens of paintings a day, leading to more conflict at home. “My mother was strongly opposed to my becoming an artist. She was from a very old, conservative family. She was a collector of art and desperately wanted me to become one, too. Whenever I drew or made sculptures, she would fly into a rage and throw paints and canvases at me.”
Eventually, in 1957, Kusama left Japan for New York, following a lengthy correspondence with the American artist Georgia O’Keefe. “I had been a great admirer after coming across her work in an old book I found in a store in my hometown. Her works are wonderful, moving. I spent six hours traveling to Tokyo so I could find her address in Who’s Who at the US embassy. Amazingly, she wrote back, and we kept writing to each other.”
In America, Kusama’s installations caught the eye of critics and collectors. Her Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show — a real rowing boat encrusted with phallic protuberances — caused a sensation when it appeared at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York in 1963. “That kind of exhibition was extremely avant garde at the time,” she says. “Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism were the big thing then. But they all came to see me and asked me why I did what I did. I said I just do Kusama art.” Andy Warhol, she says, asked her permission to use the patterns in his silk screens. She refused. “People were queuing in the streets, waiting to see a Kusama original,” she says. “After my mirror room show, other artists like Claes Oldenburg started making soft sculptures. So many artists have been influenced by my art and repeat my vision.”
But Kusama’s mental health deteriorated to such an extent that, in 1973, she returned home for treatment. In 1975 she checked herself into the psychiatric hospital she still calls home, finding that the routine gave her the order she needed to concentrate on her work. She slowly crept back into the public consciousness, and in 2006 she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan’s most prestigious arts prizes.
Kusama has often said that if it weren’t for art, she would have killed herself long ago. “I only slept two hours last night. When I get tired from making pictures, I find it really difficult to go to sleep. But it’s how I get away from my illness and escape the hallucinations. I call it psychosomatic art.” So why does her work seem more like a celebration of life’s euphoric moments? “I don’t really think about what my emotions are. I don’t plan to make them nice and cheerful, but once I start, they just move in that direction. My hands start moving before I can think anything.”
Kusama will be happy if the new exhibition “brings people around to the idea of the infinity of the cosmos and the beauty of life. Nothing I do stays in the gallery space. Everything I do is a walk in my mind. There are no limits.” It seems almost inappropriate to ask if she ever considers retiring. “No. As long as I have the energy, I will carry on. I’d like to live 200 or 300 years. I want to leave my message to my successors and future generations.”
Walking In My Mind is at the Hayward Gallery, London, from June 23 to Sept. 6 (haywardgallery.org.uk).
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
RSS