Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who has become an Instagram favorite in her 90s with her fantastical pumpkin sculptures, polka dots and kaleidoscopic infinity rooms, is the subject of a blockbuster retrospective heading to Australia.
In December, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) will present one of its most expansive exhibitions to date, with eight decades of work by Kusama — now 95 years old — on display across the gallery’s entire ground floor.
The retrospective will spill out of the gallery’s interiors and on to the Federation Court, and will include an as yet unseen Kusama installation under the cascades of the building’s familiar water wall.
Photo: Chan Shih-hung, Taipei Times
Among the 180 works on show will be at least one new “infinity mirror room”: a room of mirrors, polka dots and colored lights that reflect forever. It is these immersive kaleidoscopic works, representing Kusama’s lifelong exploration of self-obliteration and the infinity of space, that have earned her the title of world’s most Instagrammable artist.
With more than 20 mirror rooms in existence across the world, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC made history in 2022 when it showed six of the rooms in the one exhibition. After seven months on display the museum was forced to extend the exhibition twice, such was the public demand.
The NGV isn’t stating definitively how many infinity rooms Melbourne will get yet, but the senior NGV curators Wayne Crothers and Miranda Wallace have suggested it will be more than six.
‘A VERY DIFFERENT PUMPKIN’
The exhibition will also give Australia its first glimpse of a newly acquired Dancing Pumpkin, one of three Kusama has recently created, the first being displayed in the New York Botanical Garden in 2021.
“It’s a very different pumpkin to the iconic pumpkin that everybody knows,” Crothers said.
“It’s a new version of the pumpkin, a huge piece which sort of lifts off the ground, almost five meters high and about seven meters across. It’s almost like a huge sort of pavilion that you can walk around underneath.”
Kusama has been painting and sculpting pumpkins since she was a child, growing up on a plant nursery and seed farm in Hirohito’s militarized Japan. It is believed the Alice in Wonderland surrealism of her work developed at a young age after she began experiencing hallucinations. According to the 2018 documentary Kusama: Infinity, the artist used art to make sense of her mental turmoil and childhood abuse.
Her obsession with self-obliteration began to mature once she arrived in New York, creating her first infinity mirror room in 1965.
The following year she invited herself to the Venice Biennale and set up what she described as her “kinetic carpet” outside the host country’s pavilion. Her Narcissus Garden, consisting of hundreds of mirrored spheres, was sold off by the artist one ball at a time for US$2 each until biennale authorities put a stop to it.
In an exhibition that pays homage to all eight decades of Kusama’s paintings, sculptures, installations, writing and activism, the NGV exhibition will include a new iteration of Narcissus Garden that will involve 1,400 reflective silver balls.
Kusama was commenting on the commercialization of art at the time, Wallace said, saying her take on Narcissus Garden for the NGV would be “a kind of new version … for the 21st century.”
THE PRICE OF ART
Visitors would be asked to donate to enable the NGV to buy the work for its collection — a strategy the gallery used in 2018 that enabled it to acquire Salvador Dali’s 1946 painting Trilogy of the desert: Mirage, costing more than US$3 million.
The nonagenarian artist will not be attending the opening of her Australian retrospective. Kusama has rarely travelled outside Japan since she voluntarily committed herself to a psychiatric facility outside Tokyo in the 1970s. She travels the short distance to her studio each day where she continues her art practice, which has been focused on painting since the early 2000s.
Works created in her childhood, and those created as recently as this year, will be included in the retrospective.
“The advantage of seeing this enormous longevity of practice is that you begin to understand how there are these connections between the works of the 1950s and 60s through to the present,” Wallace said.
“It’s an interesting journey to go on, which is why we’ve devoted the space to it. It’s an expansive story.”
Yayoi Kusama will open at the NGV on Dec. 15.
Last week saw the appearance of another odious screed full of lies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian (肖千), in the Financial Review, a major Australian paper. Xiao’s piece was presented without challenge or caveat. His “Seven truths on why Taiwan always will be China’s” presented a “greatest hits” of the litany of PRC falsehoods. This includes: Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were descended from the people of China 30,000 years ago; a “Chinese” imperial government administrated Taiwan in the 14th century; Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), “recovered” Taiwan for China; the Qing owned
Jan. 20 to Jan. 26 Taipei was in a jubilant, patriotic mood on the morning of Jan. 25, 1954. Flags hung outside shops and residences, people chanted anti-communist slogans and rousing music blared from loudspeakers. The occasion was the arrival of about 14,000 Chinese prisoners from the Korean War, who had elected to head to Taiwan instead of being repatriated to China. The majority landed in Keelung over three days and were paraded through the capital to great fanfare. Air Force planes dropped colorful flyers, one of which read, “You’re back, you’re finally back. You finally overcame the evil communist bandits and
When 17-year-old Lin Shih (林石) crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1746 with a group of settlers, he could hardly have known the magnitude of wealth and influence his family would later amass on the island, or that one day tourists would be walking through the home of his descendants in central Taiwan. He might also have been surprised to see the family home located in Wufeng District (霧峰) of Taichung, as Lin initially settled further north in what is now Dali District (大里). However, after the Qing executed him for his alleged participation in the Lin Shuang-Wen Rebellion (林爽文事件), his grandsons were
I am kneeling quite awkwardly on a cushion in a yoga studio in London’s Shoreditch on an unseasonably chilly Wednesday and wondering when exactly will be the optimum time to rearrange my legs. I have an ice-cold mango and passion fruit kombucha beside me and an agonising case of pins and needles. The solution to pins and needles, I learned a few years ago, is to directly confront the agony: pull your legs out from underneath you, bend your toes up as high as they can reach, and yes, it will hurt far more initially, but then the pain subsides.
RSS