"One day I was painting with infinite nets and dots, and suddenly my brush moved beyond the canvas of its own accord and began covering the table, the floor and the entire room with nets and dots, spreading to my hands and my body. I think it was a hallucination. After that incident, I chose the path of sculpture and performance," Yayoi Kusama wrote in her autobiography.
Kusama, the giant of contemporary art who endured 97 years among the infinite dots that began in fear, has died. Yayoi Kusama Studio announced on its official website on the 27th that Kusama died at a Tokyo hospital on the 14th. "She devoted everything to her international career as an avant-garde artist across many fields, centered on art but extending to performance, novels and poetry, and hers was a life of 97 years spent exploring eternal love and the soul, never setting down her brush until just before her death," the studio said in a statement of mourning.
Kusama is familiar even to the general public for her enormous pumpkin objects built on a motif of richly colored polka dots. Her best-known works include sculptures and paintings of polka-dotted pumpkins, the installation "Infinity Mirror Room," hung with countless circular mirrors, and the "Infinity Net" series of abstract paintings in the form of webs.
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, to a wealthy family that ran a seed and nursery business, Kusama suffered from childhood from hallucinations and auditory hallucinations in which patterns covered everything before her eyes. Drawing the flowers, trees and stones she saw around her every day, she came to believe that the world surrounding her was made up of an array of infinite dots. "The Earth is only one polka dot among the millions of stars in the universe," she said during her lifetime.
Kusama's mother wanted her daughter to become an ordinary housewife and discouraged her from painting at all. Kusama entered the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts but grew disillusioned with Japan's education system, quit and continued working on her own. Feeling the limits of working within Japan, she moved to New York in 1957, at the age of 28. In the late 1960s, as hippie culture spread, she took her work to the streets. She broadened her artistic reach with avant-garde work in which she painted polka dots on the bodies of people protesting the Vietnam War. But amid financial hardship, the end of a relationship and continuing mental distress, she returned to Japan in 1973 and voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She continued to produce work, moving between the hospital and a nearby studio.
For her, art was the endless repetition and proliferation of the world she confronted. One dot became thousands of dots, and one net extended into an endless net. Her own reflection in the mirror multiplied infinitely, and in the end even the boundary of the individual disappeared. The themes of "infinity" and "self-obliteration" that run through her work were forged in that way, out of her life and her art.
Kusama's artistic achievement began to draw the attention of the international art world only in the 1990s. She was chosen to represent the Japanese Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and from 1998 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York held retrospectives of her work. In 2017 she opened a museum bearing her name in Tokyo's Shinjuku district for the people around the world seeking out her work.
Her work also enjoys intense popularity in South Korea. She held a solo exhibition using an entire building at the Artsonje Center in Seoul in 2003, and 330,000 people visited her solo show at the Daegu Art Museum in 2013. At a Seoul Auction sale in March, "Pumpkin (MBOK)," a 2015 work measuring 160 centimeters by 130 centimeters, sold for 10.45 billion won.
