So who really is the “Dot Lady?”
Artist Profile: Yayoi Kusama
Known for her mesmerizing patterns and eye-catching color palate, Yayoi Kusama has been a prominent figure in the avant-garde art scene since the beginning of her career in the 1950’s. Kusama’s work has been drastically influenced by the vivid hallucinations that have affected the artist ever since she was a little girl. Polka dots, amoebic shapes, and infinite nets are some of the recurring forms that have dominated her hallucinations as well as her artwork. Kusama uses her art as a way to express her obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation.
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto Japan, Yayoi Kusama spent most of her childhood painting. While studying traditional Japanese art in Kyoto, Kusama developed her own artistic style and ultimately gravitated towards the Japanese experimental art scene in Tokyo. Inspired by abstract expressionism and other evolving art movements from the West, Kusama moved to the United States in 1957, spending a year in Seattle, Washington, where her first solo exhibition took place. The following year, Kusama moved to New York City and became immersed in the city’s flourishing avant-garde scene.
In her lifetime, Kusama has worked with a broad variety of media including painting, drawing, print, sculpture, film, and installation, as well as leading a number of happenings during the 1960’s. After years of success with her artwork in New York, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 to focus on her health, but has continued her practice of producing artwork and is now considered to be one of Japan’s most famous contemporary artists.
Infinity Nets [KAO] (above) is one of Kusama’s many works from her “Infinity Nets” series. From afar, these works appear to be the result of thousands of repeated painted dots. Upon close inspection, the true process is revealed with the repeated whirling arcs of paint that take over her massive canvases. The concept of nets is also seen in the busy backgrounds of many of her works, such as screen prints Three Pumpkins (Kabocha Mitsu) and Lemon Juice (Remon Jyusu). Additionally, both prints employ Kusama’s signature motif, polka dots. In her autobiography Infinity Nets, Kusama explains that her “desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from [her] own position in it, with dots — an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net.”
Kusama has used her art as a way to channel her psychological condition and maintain a balance with reality, as well as to offer the public insight into her chaotic state of mind. For Kusama, her infinity nets are a means of creating a protective surface, or a safety net, to distance herself from the rest of the world, yet the repetition of dots and continuation of nets that have been produced from her hallucinations seem to have provided the 85-year-old artist a sense of control. Voluntarily residing in a Tokyo psychiatric facility since 1977, Kusama continues to make art and write poetry. Reflecting on her life while looking to the future, Yayoi Kusama has stressed that her message to the people is all about love. “Over many long years, with art as a weapon, I have treaded the path in search of love. I want to shout love louder to the world and leave my mark there.” ▲
Bibliography
Hasegawa, Yuko, and Pamela Miki. “The Spell to Re-integrate the Self: The Significance of the Work of Yayoi Kusama in the New Era.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, no. 13 (2006): 46–53. Accessed February 18, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20711605.
Kusama, Yayoi. Eternity of Eternal Eternity. Kochi: Museum of Art, 2013.
Kusama, Yayoi. Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Turner, Grady T. “Yayoi Kusama.” Bomb Magazine, January 1, 1999. Accessed February 22, 2015. http://bombmagazine.org/article/2192/
“Yayoi Kusama: 9 February — 5 June 2012,” YouTube video, 7:23, Posted by “Tate,” February 6, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRZR3nsiIeA.
