The five polka dots of Yayoi Kusama
Trying to talk about someone’s life (especially when it’s not over yet) is hard to do without using long sentences like a bibliography. All the more as so the multiple talented artist we want you to meet has been an important subject within the artistic community but not only.
Using her favourite pattern, here are five points to know about the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.
-
90 years old
Born in Matsumoto, the creative mind of this red-hair lady started to grow from her youngest age. Yayoi Kusama learned the basics of art by studying nihonga, traditional Japanese painting style, but has always been attracted by the American abstract expressionism movement. Nowadays, she is known for her conceptual contemporary art. But she doesn’t limit her art to one form of expression, and works in sculpture, painting, happenings, video, fashion, drawing too.
-
International
This ”first art love” was probably the reason she left for the USA at the end of the 50s, with only a few dollars in her pocket. She starts to get famous by the serie of paintings Infinity Net, but also for one of her happening performance where participants’ naked bodies were covered in polka dots. Her international career takes off in the American 60s.
-
Polka dots
If there is one and only thing you need to know about this strange Japanese artist, and which is quite obvious after seeing only one of her work, is she is very fond of polka dots. You find them everywhere on her works, like a signature. You can get to know her universe at her hometown in Matsumoto, where she has her own museum, but also by taking a look at the painting in Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art.
Her two most famous piece of work, a red and a yellow pumpkin, gaze at the Seto inland Sea on Naoshima island’s shores.
-
Catharsis
With a traumatic daily life childhood, limited into her growth and fulfilment as a child, while being raised in a toxic domestic environment during the Second World War II, Yayoi Kusama starts experiencing hallucinations at an early age. She says she was surprised to discover that not only humans, but flowers too, could talk.
Many agree on the fact that her unique artistic style, focused on her obsession for dots, is a catharsis. Suffering from depression, she confides in an interview that creating repetitively the same pattern helps her in facing her demons but also in immersing others into her universe.
She has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital, allowing her to express her whole talent within a safe space.
-
Infinity
Rather than a simple catharsis, Yayoi Kusama describes her work's origin and purpose as below:
" 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. "
