The Crazy Polka-dot Lady

    People may not remember the name Yayoi Kusama, but for those who have seen her work, it's really hard not to be impressed by her stunning polka dots obsession. She is known as the 86 year old polka-dot princess, one of the most famous artist in Japan and who has influenced on several generations of contemporary artists. You will never fail to find polka dots in her work. Hundreds... thousands...millions of polka dots, big and small, repeatedly, and are often presented with lively bright colors. Not only her work, but the way she dresses herself also states strongly of Yayoi Kusama's style. She always show up in her bright red wig, heavily outlined makeup, and a colorful dress with her very own polka dot patten. You couldn't mistaken her for someone else, and will not feel that she is out of place with her custom. Yayoi Kusama is no doubt an unique character.



     Have you ever wondered about how Yayoi Kusama came to be? Yayoi Kusama was born at March 22 1929 in the mountain region of  Nagano Prefecture,  a town known as the Matsumoto City. She was born and raised by a upper middle class family which makes a living from wholesale seed nurseries. She was the smallest child among her four siblings. However, it wasn't until much later that she exposed her childhood experience being abused by her mother, who's violence was released upon small Yayoi because Yayoi's father had affairs with many other women. Neither of her parents gave her support nor love. Her childhood memory remained a dreadful impact throughout her entire life. Which ultimately lead to her artistic career as a feminist, and her anger against any type of political and social oppression.

‘My father had lots of lovers and I had to spy on him for my mother. Because my mother was very angry it made even the idea of sex very traumatic for me. My work, including the naked happenings, is always about overcoming that bad experience. And my visual language all still comes from my hallucinations, which I have seen since my childhood.’

 

      Below is the portrait of Yayoi Kusama's mother, who is covered with dots.

 

      Like most artists, Yayoi Kusama discovered her interest in art ever since she was little. Her passion to become a professional artist, of course, was strongly discouraged by her family, who expected her to be like every other female in Japan, to be trained as a traditional housewife. It was extremely rare for a woman to pursue an artistic career, even in western culture. Kusama left home in pursue of her art career. She combined learning from both Japanese Nihonga style and Western soil painting style and eventually developed her very own art style, by turning her hallucination into physical drawings. She would see plants with human face, they talk to her with voices that's too loud to bear. Or, she sees bright light with every kind of different shape. Each time she experienced hallucinations, she would go home and draw those images into her sketchbook. She said it's her way to "control" her fear and despair. Art is her last resort to keep her living.

Yayoi Kusama in her youth

     Yayoi Kusama is a person who constantly travels between fantasy and reality, to her is not such a pleasant experience at all. You will sense a lot of "despair", "brokenness","vanished" and many many things words can't describe in Yayoi Kusama's art. She is constantly living on the edge of life and death, fighting against her misery, anxiety, and fear. Art is her medicine, the last open window of the living prison. To her, the phrase "art is life" is most true to her in both mental form and physical form than any other artists in the world.

Early Years

     1948, Yayoi Kusama overcame her parents' objection to attend for a year at Kyoto Municipal Hiyoshigaoka Upper Secondary School to study the modem Japanese Nihonga style. However, she was disappointed by the strict hierarchical approach of the master-student dynamic and saw the limitations of Nihonga painting itself.

     This painting called "Lingering Dream" was Yayoi Kusama's few Nihonga style painting she produced in her early years. Through the painting she presented to the viewer a war-scarred landscape with crimson sunflower.

      Soon Yayoi Kusama turned her attention to the European art. She was heavily influenced by symbolism and surrealism as well as contemporary avant-garde movements. She taught herself Western style oil painting, with mixture of the Nihonga style, she made these paintings.

Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by Curtain of Depersonalization)

On the Table

Tree 1952

God of the Wind

Dance Custom

     Yayoi Kusama produced over two hundreds fifty artworks in early 1950s. She was only in her twenties. She used variety of media including ink, pastel, watercolor, gouache and tempera. All her paintings are similar yet very different in style. They all feature abstracted forms that suggest natural phenomena. Tiny hieroglyphic details can be found all over her paintings: eyes, dots, spiky networks of cilia and tapole-like forms.

     "She combines various techniques from Cubism and Surrealism, such as decalcomanie and frottage, and makes them her own, getting unforeseen results from such juxtapositions. Her work has no connection to the doctrines of Cubism or Surrealism but seems to operate directly through the senses, linking technique to physiology without conflict or contradiction. It's a very feminine painterly sensibility, and the works done some years ago with traditional Japanese materials are masterfully evocative. " said Kenjiro Okamoto, an art critic

     Despite such success, Yayoi Kusama felt that Japan was too small, too servile, too feudalitsitc and too scornful of women. She wants a bigger stage - U.S.A.

Infinity Net

Yayoi Kusama has many tags, feminist, minimalist, surrealist, abstractist...etc. She is the most famous polka dot lady, the artistic genius, the woman in the center of the world's attention. According to record, about 30 percent of designs of Japanese teenager outfits use polka dots pattern. But in Yayoi Kusama's own description, she claims herself as merely an "obsessive artist". Yayoi Kusama  is widely known for her mental condition, just as much as people know about her polka dots. She suffers from hallucinations and severe obsessive thoughts - what we called the obsessive neurosis, since she was ten. Her world is often occupied with illusions, surrounded by what she called "Infinity Nets", a topic that often appeared in her painting and in her own autobiography. Since then she puts all her effort into recreating the hallucination she is seeing. madly repetitive polka dot patterns that represents her world. Yayoi Kusama remained a patient of a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and has continued to live there to this day. Mental illness and art-creation occupied the majority of her life. In a way, her mental condition has greatly contributed, inspired, and form the famous artist we know today.

‘One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle.’ - Yayoi Kusama.

     The world is different in her eyes. Yayoi Kusama described her ongoing series of Infinity Net paintings as, "without beginning, end, or center. The entire canvas would be occupied by a monochromatic net. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling." The "nets" are crescent shaped brush strokes of paint across canvas like flowing river. Each mark is connected, but individually applied, gradually shifting in directions that's neither random nor systematic. Compare to other abstract expressions that are more of bursting energy, her Infinity Net are unpretentious and repetitive, building a more direct perceptual experience.

No. 2, Yayoi Kusama

      In 2008, Yayoi Kusama sold her first Infinity Net painting to Donald Judd for 5,794,500, the highest price paid for a living artist at that time. The painting is called No.2, done in 1959, the year when she first initiated the series. The following years she continuous to produce quantitative Infinity Net series, which she would paint uninterruptedly for 40 to 50 hours.

Infinity Net TWPPQ

     This is a white on white painting in 2008. Her net has evolved from her first painting No 2, to a more sophisticated art piece. Like what she had done with No.2, Yayoi Kusama first painted the canvas black and layer another layer of white paint on top of the black to create a constantly shifting space, an indeterminate pictorial depth between the two colors. Then she adds on repetitive marks of white paint to create the flowing pattern.

     

Inifinity Net TTOOX

          Contrasting to the white on white Infinity Net above, this is a black on black painting in which Yayoi Kusama obliterates all pictorial space and utilize the boldness of the color of black paint to its extent. Although the colors are dark but instead of picking up mostly darkness from the painting, the viewer sees more light. As the lighting situation changes in the gallery, the light of the paint shifts as well.

Infinity Net QZAAL

    Infinity Net QZAAL is a blue on gold painting done in 2009. The gold seems as if it is floating on top of the surface, creating a spacial illusion through color.

    Her net painting are recognized as some of the most compelling works of modern art, and she always return to work on more Infinity Net periodically, as it might be the purest expression of her sense of art and life. From far distance these painting almost read as monochromatic, even opaque with noisy textures. However going up close you will start to see the intricate patterns among the surface of the canvas; small repetitive marks of paint which appear to even extend beyond the picture plane to convey infinity. The viewers will start to wonder, is that really what the world looks like for Yayoi Kusama?

Sculptures

     Yayoi Kusama started her practice into sculpture art during her stay in New York in 1961, where she befriended Donald Judd, one of Kusama's close and supportive colleague in her artistic career. She began fabricating 3-dimensional objects covered with repetitive patterns. She used objects from everyday life and covered them with proliferation of sewn, stuffed fabric phalli.Through her hands these furniture began to obtain  a surreal quality, suggesting dreamlike world in which an internal obsession is projected into physical form.

      Yayoi Kusama first exhibited her sculpture work at the Green Gallery in New York in Jun 2 1962, one of the first exhibitions of burgeoning American pop art movement. She is among the group of young artists including Warhol, Oldenburg, Judd and Robert Morris who made famous from gallery shows. Yayoi Kusama was the only Asian "Outsider".

Yayoi Kusama's shoe sculptures, which also turns into a series.

     One of her most memorable piece from Yayoi Kusama's early sculpture art is probably the "Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show" at Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The boat was scavenged by Kusama and Judd from the street. The boat was installed in a room where the walls and ceiling are covered with 999 black and white posters of the same boat scene.

     In 1965 Yayoi Kusama released her most ambitious gallery presentation - "Floor Show" at Castellane Gallery. She presented large numbers of phallus-encrusted works in which included "Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli's Field", a room size installation with mirrored walls and ceiling that appeared to reflect sea of red on white polka-dotted phallic protrusions covering the floor. 

Yayoi Kusama refers to her phallus-covered works as the "Sex Obsession" series. The phalli represents her fear of sex, she was trying to lose herself in the act of art making to neutralize her neurotic anxiety of male sex organ.

Performance art

     Due to financial burden and socio-political mood of the time, by 1967 Yayoi Kusama expanded her art to another field - the performance art. America at the time was heavily involved with Civil Rights movement and Vietnam protest movement, which lead to increasing open attitude to sexuality, drug use and mysticism. Yayoi Kusama's performance art also involved these themes.

     Yayoi Kusama presented "Self-Obliteration: An Audio-Visual-Light Performance" at Black Get Theater in New York. During which Yayoi Kusama and her models will complete obliterate themselves in a polka-dot dance party. She directed the "Kusama's Self-Obliteration" a film shot by Jud Yalkut. The film used polka-dots to conceal people, animals, environments, and everything around. Yayoi Kusama use the film as a metaphor to give up identity, ablosh uniqueness to become with the universe or what she called "self-obliteration,"

     Her performance arts were huge success, yet she also faced many controversies against her excessive use of nudity to convey sensitive themes on political and social topics such as homosexuality. In Japan, she was once seen as the "shame of the country". The provocative performances brought her fame to a new level. However, her depression and ill health were also brought to a critical level due to over-exposure.

     By early 1977, Yayoi Kusama permanently relocate back to Japan where she spend most of her life fighting against her own hallucination and mental illness till this day.

     Yayoi Kusama was never married. Rumors float around regarding Yayoi Kusama's love relationship with many of her artist friends, she acknowledged none but only one - Joseph Cornell. Their love story was just as legendary as their artworks. The lovers were 25 years apart in age. 58 year old Cornell fell in love for the first time with 33 year old Kusama. Both were neurotic and scared of the opposite gender, they were never married, never had sex. Yet they were bound by pure love for a decade long. It was never confirmed about Yayoi Kusama's deteriorating mental health in 1977 was directly affected by the death of Cornell. However, they definitely remained irreplaceable in each others life, and art.