Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment.

Yayoi Kusama is world-famous a contemporary artist born in Japan in 1929. Known most notably for her work with polka-dots, she’s considered one of the world’s most successful living female artists.

The inspiration for Kusama’s artistic expression with polka dots stems from vivid hallucinations of flowers and patterns on fabric she experienced as a child, which she describes as ‘flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots’. The hallucinations, which included the coming to life and multiplying of flowers and patterns continues throughout her career, through a process she refers to as ‘self-obliteration’.

This feeling of disappearance into an endless field of dots, makes her feel like she is making her objects and herself ‘melt into, and become part of, the bigger universe’. She said, ‘Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment’.

As a teenager, Kusama worked in a military factory where she made parachutes for the Japanese army during World War II. Her first hand experience of war apparently led her to value notions of personal and creative freedom, something which she could find within the artistic process.

Following the end of WWII, Kusama studied traditional Japanese painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948, which she allegedly found ‘dogmatic and depressing’. Kusama moved to NYC in 1957, following her first international exhibition in Seattle which fuelled interest in her creative expression.

Kusama held the company of several contemporary artists of her time, including Georgia O’Keefe, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. Critically acclaimed, Kusama produced a number of exhibits in the twenty years she spent in America.

Kusama was the first woman to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Here she rose to international acclaim with her installation, Narcissus Garden – a ‘sprawling display of 1,500 silver spheres, scattered in organised disarray’ which has been commissioned and reinstalled at a number of locations around the world.

In 1968, half a century ahead of its time, Kusama staged New York’s first ‘homosexual wedding’, in which she created a wedding dress complete with holes to reveal breasts and buttocks, further cementing her notoriety in America.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1977. In March of that year, Kusama admitted herself into a psychiatric hospital, where she’s voluntarily stayed for over four decades. She continues to practice art every day, and in 2017 opened her own 5-story gallery in Tokyo.

Kusama has had a number of large scale exhibitions around the world, with extensive interest in her work due to the captivating nature of her ‘infinity mirror rooms’ – a combination of coloured lighted, painted pumpkins, and polka dots that reflect to infinity. In fact, one of Kusama’s infinity mirror room exhibits, ‘Spirits of the pumpkins descended into the heavens’ was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and is now showing.

Source:
Tate Modern
Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s
Khan Academy
National Gallery of Australia
The Guardian
Wikipedia

Yayoi Kusama image copyright sourced via CNN.

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