Yayoi Kusama
The artist of dots and infinity.
Yayoi Kusama was part of the New York avant-garde in the 1960s and has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since 1977. Her mirror rooms draw queues all over the world.
Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto in Japan's mountainous interior, into a well-to-do family that ran a plant nursery. Even as a child she had hallucinations in which the world was covered with dots and nets, and she has described art as a way of coping with them. She studied traditional Japanese painting, nihonga, in Kyoto but felt confined by both the school and her family.
In 1957 she moved to the United States and arrived in New York the following year. There she attracted attention with her Infinity Net paintings, large canvases covered with small arcs that form an endless net. She also made soft sculptures in which furniture and objects were covered with sewn fabric protrusions. In 1965 she showed her first mirror room, in which mirrors multiplied dots and forms into infinity. She mixed with artists such as Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell and influenced Pop Art and Minimalism.
In the late 1960s she staged happenings in which naked participants were painted with dots, often in protest against the Vietnam War. At the 1966 Venice Biennale she laid out hundreds of mirrored spheres on the grass outside the pavilions and sold them, a work called Narcissus Garden. She received a great deal of attention but also criticism, and felt exploited by the art world.
In 1973 she returned to Japan in poor health. Since 1977 she has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and works in a studio nearby. She has also written novels and poetry. In the 1990s interest grew again: she represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and the following year her yellow polka-dot pumpkin was installed on the island of Naoshima.
Today Kusama is one of the world's best-known and most visited contemporary artists. Her mirror rooms draw long queues, for example at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, which has a permanent room. In 2017 a museum of her own opened in Tokyo. Collaborations with the fashion house Louis Vuitton have made her dots part of popular culture, and she continues to work at an advanced age.