Yayoi Kusama, the artist who painted her hallucinations and achieved worldwide success, has died.
On August 14, Yayoi Kusama, the most commercially successful artist of our time, died in Tokyo. She was 97. In the 1950s, Kusama moved from post-war Japan to New York, then the world's art capital, and became a counterculture artist. She achieved international recognition much later, in the 1990s. Critic Anton Khitrov tells the publication Medusa, what brought Kusama to the West, why she became disillusioned with America, and how her signature polka dot pattern can be interpreted.
If you don't know anything about Yayoi Kusama, her endless rooms of mirrors and glossy, spotted pumpkins can easily be mistaken for harmless arts and crafts.
Among international art stars, no one has nailed the Instagram aesthetic quite like her: the hashtag #yayoikusama yields 1,2 million posts on the social network—far more than Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Marina Abramović. A significant number of these posts are identical selfies in Kusama's mirror installations, which she began creating long before smartphones and, of course, were not intended for photo shoots.
On the subject: The famous artist's painting hung upside down in the museum for decades.
Her work sells better than any other contemporary artist; her solo exhibition is a guaranteed hit for virtually any museum. And Kusama's signature polka dot pattern, as demonstrated by her collaboration with Louis Vuitton, is extremely profitable. looks on bags, clothes, shop windows and facades of shopping centers.
All this says little about the nature of her art. Kusama can't be called a commercial artist in the traditional sense, if only because she never conformed to other people's expectations. And she only truly became famous in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after thirty years of an uneven career. As for polka dots—the first association her name evokes—they're not just a pretty pattern, but something far more interesting.
Kusama struggled with normativity her entire life. She was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, in the Japanese Alps, into a conservative family where corporal punishment was commonplace; her stern mother saw her daughter as a future housewife and would have none of the arts. Kusama, however, continued to draw—it was the only way to tame her anxiety.
The fact is, Kusama had been haunted by hallucinations since childhood: she heard flowers from the family nursery speak to her, saw patterns and dots—those same ones—and felt herself dissolving into infinite space (many years later, Yayoi tried to convey this sensation in mirror installations, where countless copies of visitors are lost among multicolored lights and speckled sculptures). When the girl came to, reality proved even more unstable: her father was unfaithful to her mother, she was tormented by suspicions, and the country was at war. As a schoolgirl, Kusama, like many of her peers, worked in a factory, sewing parachutes for the imperial army.
Soon after the Japanese surrender, in 1948, she finally persuaded her parents to allow her to attend art school in Kyoto. There, Kusama was taught nihonga, traditional Japanese painting. She found the education too conservative; reproductions of Western abstract artists had already reached Japan, and the artist looked up to her American colleagues, especially Georgia O'Keeffe, the most famous woman artist of the era, rather than her teachers. She even corresponded with O'Keeffe for a time, and O'Keeffe supported her ambitious admirer.
In the late 1950s, Kusama decided to move to New York. Her American career was difficult: the local art community was reluctant to accept a woman, especially an Asian one. However, white men readily adopted her ideas: it is known that future pop art classics—Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and possibly even Roy Lichtenstein—borrowed many inspirations from the young artist. For example, it was Kusama who first began sewing soft rag sculptures, not Oldenburg, who later made his name with them.
America also had its share of militarism, just as Japan once had. When the US sent soldiers to Vietnam, Kusama became an anti-war activist, organizing protests and, in 1968, writing an open letter to President Nixon.
"Among millions of celestial bodies, our planet is like a tiny pea," the artist wrote, referring to her already established creative style. "But other spheres are quiet and peaceful, while on our globe, discord and hatred reign. Let's turn it into a Garden of Eden together."
As this quote makes clear, Kusama associated the polka-dot pattern with more than just her hallucinations; a polka-dot, as the artist explained, is never alone, always part of a whole. In other words, for her, this pattern was a protest against individualism, American or otherwise.
In those years, Kusama was a classic counterculture heroine. She publicly stripped naked and painted dots on herself; ran a gay club and made dresses for orgies; encouraged like-minded people to dance naked in front of the New York Stock Exchange and was arrested by the police for indecent behavior. In patriarchal Japan, her reputation was dire: the Kyoto Art School even removed Kusama from its list of distinguished alumni. But when the artist became completely disillusioned with America in the 1970s, she finally returned home. Since then, she has been largely forgotten for many years.
Kusama's mental state worsened over the years. In 1977, she voluntarily committed herself permanently to a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, which she was, however, free to leave. Primarily, of course, to work in her art studio. She was still about ten years away from achieving worldwide popularity. In 1993, when Kusama was in her sixties, she was sent to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale: the artist exhibited yellow pumpkins with black polka dots, an installation that was universally remembered.
Fertility images, familiar to Kusama from her childhood on the farm, are key to her art. It's not just pumpkins: even her early works abound with phallic symbols—tentacles, shoots, snakes, and so on. The artist's depictions of plant life are fundamentally unmanageable: at one point, her favorite format was "accumulative sculptures"—sofas and chairs covered in random growths like mushrooms or corals, as if on a sunken ship or in an abandoned jungle city.
Polka dots act in a similar manner in some of her installations. For example, in "Destruction Room" (2002), Kusama invited viewers to leave colorful stickers in a white interior; the randomly placed bright dots resembled mold or lichen rather than a pattern.
The pea pattern isn't as harmless as it seems at first glance. In nature, this pattern is found on poisonous organisms—like fly agarics, tropical poison dart frogs, and some octopuses—to warn predators that they are inedible.
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But mold, lichen, and poisonous octopuses are all organic parts of the ecosystem; life doesn't have to be comfortable, Kusama insists in her works. All her art is, at its core, a rebellion against the norms humans impose on both nature and themselves. As for commercial success, it's because "we all yearn for freedom."
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