Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama – Authority and severity characterised the artist’s childhood and youth

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto in Japan on 22 March 1929. Her parental house reflected the severity of the prevailing Japanese military state, with her childhood marked by authority and tradition, and during the Second World War, Yayoi Kusama served in a parachute factory. Her wish to study at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts was granted by her mother on the proviso that during that time she also studied Japanese etiquette with relatives based in Kyôto. Due to the constraints of her environment, Yayoi Kusama suffered from hallucinations early on: she would see continuous structures of dots and lines before her eyes and was plague by the fear of getting caught or dissolving in those nets. Artistic activity offered her the chance of dealing with her anxiety, but the prevailing social conditions made it difficult for her as a woman to gain a foothold in the Japanese art scene. 

Breakthrough in the West with polka dots and nude happenings

From the beginning, Yayoi Kusama was open about her illness and made the red dots which plagued her into the subject of her art. Her panic attacks and anxiety disorders became new worlds in dizzying amounts into which she drew her audience. The artist explained that the earth is ultimately only a single dot in the universe, and that she sees her polka dots as a viable path to infinity. In the 1960s, she organized whole ‘Happenings’ in which she painted naked models with dots and prompted complete strangers to take part. These notorious actions were to celebrate sexual freedom and to be understood as a political protest for peace. Although she had reached wide prominence early on in her homeland of Japan with several exhibitions, she was rejected by the established Japanese art scene. On her move to the USA – encouraged by written exchange with the artist Georgia O’Keefe – Yayoi Kusama destroyed a large part of her work. Her parents paid for her travel on the promise that she would never return to Japan – she had brought shame on the family and had also resisted a desired marriage. 

A much-celebrated idol of the selfie generation

Yayoi Kusama admitted herself often into psychiatric care in the course of her career, returning to Japan in the 1970s and living voluntarily in a psychiatric institute for almost four decades before making a brilliant return to the word stage of art history. Today, Kusama decorates whole rooms with colourful dots which enjoy great popularity with an international audience of millions. The selfie generation in particular have discovered the Grande Dame of Japanese art for themselves, pouring through her installations in such numbers that the hosts, such as the museum The Broad, were forced to introduce a time limit: each visitor is permitted to view the artwork for thirty seconds. Alongside dots, stuffed sculptures dominate her work, often in the form of phalluses and pumpkins, the latter being an object she owes to a childhood experience: she had to sew pumpkin seeds on her family’s estate. Modern artists such as the singer Adele pay tribute to Kusama and choose her installations for the backdrop of their own performances.