Fearless, resilient, relentless, she is a courageous artist who forged her own way to the top, despite being a Japanese woman in a white male world, in 1960s New York. She faced a number of disadvantages to stand out in the art world : she was a woman, a foreigner, mentally ill, and had strong political beliefs.
After 15 years of humiliation in New York and 40 years of psychiatric disorder, she succeeded to transfer and sublimate her neurosis into her artwork, healing herself and the world at the same time.
From artists such as Wahrol stealing her, to trying to commit suicide, she nonetheless became one of the most popular artists in the world.
Humiliations
It is almost impossible that you never came across her infinity mirror room or her giant pumpkin in Naoshima: they’re all over Instagram. What you may not know about her is that all her art is linked to her neuroses and her psychological struggles.
There are several traumas in her childhood that marked her definitively and that show through her work.
She grew up in a rather rich and prosperous family, in Matsumoto, Nagano.
However, her mother was extremely violent, selfish and thought her children were worthless. She would beat Yayoi every day, refused to let her draw, and she found the idea of art revolting. Her father, on the other hand, was loving but was disengaged from the family. He didn’t seem to have any love for his wife who forced Yayoi to follow him in secret, spy on him and to report all of his doings.
Young Yayoi Kusama caught him having sex with other women. That disgusted her from sex forever.
Hallucinations
The second trauma happened in a field of flowers where 10 years old Yayoi Kusama suffered her first anxiety attack and hallucinations.
She had the sensation that flowers were growing in number while she was fading away. She felt as if she was being swallowed by an infinite field of flowers, which would cover her entire body and face. She described it as an obliteration of her identity.
From this point on, she kept having hallucinations, including flashes of light, colors, and most notably dots that proliferate indefinitely, to the extent of causing her to vanish. That is the moment she began to draw and paint.
Her mother became even more enraged as a result of these deeds, believing her so-called visions to be crazy talk that she could not accept. For Kusama, art became even more of a haven.
One of her first known pieces is a portrait of her mother, covered with polka-dots.
At this moment her relationship with her mom and her hallucinations blended and gave birth to what will later be the trademark in her art.
Some would also argue that the polka-dots represent disappearance, which is why she would draw them all over her mother : to make disappear the first source of all her traumas.
In fact, she says “my work consists in transforming my psychological problems into art.”
Kusama recalls receiving her first oil painting set as a お土産 (souvenir) from Tokyo from the grandmother of a childhood friend, when she was around 13 years old.
Obsession
Yayoi started a written relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe, an American artist who convinced her to move to America.
She arrived in New York in 1958 with all of her money stitched into her kimono, vowing to herself that she would create many more and better works.
The truth was otherwise. Her apartment had no windows and she froze in the winter. She would frequently return home to an empty flat, with everything taken from her, including her paintings. She quickly ran out of money, struggled to find food or canvas.
She did not give up and kept painting, up to a 100 pieces a day. She painted while she was having hallucinations, instead of remembering them and painting after. Yet another hardship that she turned into art.
Her illness progressed, and she acquired acute neurosis, yet the desire to succeed and break into the art world became her consuming passion.
A doctor declared she was suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, leading to irrational thoughts (obsession) that would result in repetitive behaviors (compulsion).
Determination
Yayoi Kusama knew no fear. She was very far from being shy or having the tendency to apologize and self-efface that many, especially Japanese, women suffer.
She was completely confident in the quality of her work. She’d go to openings to approach powerful men and persuade them purchase her paintings.
That insane energy Yayoi Kusama put paid off, and she started having solo exhibitions in small galleries, some known for being gateways for successful young artists.
Feminism, as well as a desire for peace, free love, sex, and body, grew in popularity in the 1960s. She opened a church and celebrated gay weddings. She often hired homosexual models for her works, showing her intent to destabilize socially constructed notions of sexuality.
She held ‘Body Festivals’ all over New York, and painted polka dots on naked bodies of men and women, and got arrested sometimes.
“Our earth is only one polka dot among millions of others… We must forget ourselves with polka dots! We must lose ourselves in the ever-advancing stream of eternity”
Accumulation
However, the renown she was starting to get did not play in her favor.
In 1962, she created her first sculpture : Accumulation Number One, exhibited at the Green Gallery. It is an armchair covered with phalluses. The sexualized alteration of an everyday domestic object by a female artist surprised, or rather shocked critics at the time.
Claes Oldenburg, one of the great figures of pop art, saw it and described it as “psychotic art” with a “very aesthetic direction”. 3 months later, for a solo exhibition, he presented a piece with only similar soft protrusions that got international attention.
Kusama’s state of shock at seeing Oldenburg’s sewn sculpture was immeasurable. She got paranoid that one would steal her art, she was not able to leave her studio and she blindfolded her window.
Two years later, 1964, Kusama created an installation made up of a boat covered with soft penises. The boat was exposed in the middle of a room with walls covered with 999 photos of the very same boat. Andy Warhol came to the show and very much enjoyed the concept. So much, that he replicated it in one of his exhibitions where he used repeating pictures of a cow’s head to tile a room.
According to popular beliefs, Andy Warhol’s greatest contribution to American Pop Art is through the use of common objects and visual repetition. Kusama, on the other hand, came before Warhol in both regards.
In October of 1965, Lucas Samaras, another artist, created a concept of a closed room, covered with mirrors, exhibited six months later than Kusama’s very comparable piece of artwork. While Yayoi earned a few mentions in the press, Samaras received a six-page interview in a renowned magazine.
Midori Yamamura, a Professor of Art, has thoroughly checked, compared and verified, gallery exhibition checklists, testimonies, studio visit dates, and correspondence between these artists and the people around them.There is no coincidence between the important stage in the development of Pop Art and Yayoi’s work at the time. Kusama was creating art of equal importance but sexism, racism maybe, prevented her from achieving the success she aspired to.
Dedication
The worst for Yayoi Kusama is to see these artists steal her ideas and have both critical and commercial success, while she still was starving and sleeping on an old door frame.
This made her literally crazy. She tried to commit suicide in 1966 after seeing the piece of Lucas Samaras. She said “I jumped from the window. If I had landed on my head I would have died, but there was a bicycle, and I fell on it”.
Nonetheless, in June, she decided she would present in all of the institutions where she felt she belonged. She went impromptu to the Venice Biennale (the oldest international contemporary art exhibition). By doing so, she questioned the construction of artistic values, which are influenced by governments, collectors, curators, reviewers, and dealers instead of focusing on art.
She brought 1500 mirror orbs that she laid on the lawn and called it Narcissus Garden.
She sold her balls for a small fee with a small sign :
Your narcissism for 1200 liras
Kusama offered the ability to view your own reflection and fall in love with it. She is of course asked to leave, but instead she removed her kimono, unveiling a beautiful red bodysuit. She started dancing and singing and attracted all the attention of the venue.
Depression
Success, on the other hand, takes a long time to come.
She has a strong personality and strong beliefs, and it is apparent that she would not be accepted into the institutional and sanitized world of museums and galleries. Yayoi was in poor health, doctors didn’t seem to be able to help out, she suffered from depression.
She decided to return to Japan fatigued and unwell, where neither the art community nor her family greeted her well. Despite the fact that she was at home, she was in a country that had no knowledge of her or her art. She’d have to start over from the beginning.
The morals of Japan have not changed since I left, she says. ”In Japan the things I did or created were invariably met with misunderstanding and insinuations of scandal”
She tried to commit suicide, again in 1975. This led her to admit herself into a psychiatric hospital in Shinjuku.
Recognition
Today, Yayoi Kusama’s works are a gigantic success.
A few curators who had heard of her in Japan sought to find her.
In 1993, she was the first ever woman to be exhibited in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It was Yayoi Kusama’s first taste of fame, and she has since been seen all over the world.
Between 2013 and 2019 her work has gathered 5 million visitors, which is the absolute record for an artist.
In 2016, Time Magazine named Kusama one of the most influential people in art.
She is often classified in Japanese postwar art history, but we saw how she contributed to so much more than that.
She remained unassailable despite the ordeals, and MIT scholars agree that her ambitious public performances in the 1960s and 1970s foregrounded the commodity character of art.
Moreover, it is crucial to highlight how she contributed to Pop Art, as it completely changes art history.
Nowadays, she shuttles between the hospital and her studio where she creates artwork and processes the symptoms of her illness. Kusama works 8 hours a day, and writes novels at night.
art of internet 