This Artist Sees Everything in Polka Dots
TOKYO — Even the restrooms are covered in polka dots. Yayoi Kusama, the celebrated Japanese artist whose compulsively repetitive images have drawn huge crowds and critical acclaim around the world, has opened a museum in Tokyo that could only be hers. The unmistakable touches include large red polka dots and mirrors in the elevators and a bulbous mosaic pumpkin sculpture on the top floor.
“Until now, I was the one who went overseas,” said Ms. Kusama, 88, sitting in a wheelchair in front of her painting “I Who Have Arrived In The Universe” at the Yayoi Kusama Museum. “But I now recognize that there are more people coming to Japan to come to see my work,” she said.
The museum dedicated to her work, operated by a foundation she created to support the display of her paintings and installations even after her death, opened in September, and tickets quickly sold out through November.
Last spring, when Ms. Kusama’s work was exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the show attracted record numbers of visitors who stood in long lines for the chance to spend 20 or 30 seconds in each mirrored room.
The building stands five stories high in Shinjuku, a neighborhood close to Ms. Kusama’s studio and the psychiatric hospital where she has lived voluntarily since 1977.
Designed as five large cubes stacked on top of each other, the museum features galleries with high ceilings, pristine white walls and curved corners. White polka dots are stenciled onto glass panels lining the front of the building.
Ms. Kusama selected all of the art that appears in the inaugural exhibition, “Creation Is a Solitary Pursuit, Love Is What Brings You Closer to Art,” which includes mostly recent work and runs until February 25. Exhibitions will be rotated every six months.
Ms. Kusama said she creates her works during a process of obsessive concentration and hallucinations. In 2014, one of her works, “White No. 28,” sold for $7.1 million, with premium, at Christie’s.
The new exhibition includes 45 pieces, 16 of which are part of the series “My Eternal Soul” — large, electric- colored paintings that Ms. Kusama has been working on since 2009 and that were exhibited at the
National Art Center in Tokyo earlier this year. Ms. Kusama has continued to work on the series, producing a painting every day or two.
Ms. Kusama, who was born in 1929 in the mountain town of Matsumoto, began painting from hallucinations she experienced as a young girl. Some of her antiwar sentiments stem from the fact that she lived through World War II in Japan, going to work at a military factory to sew parachutes when she was just 13 years old.
She was abused by her mother and has spoken openly about her mental neuroses.
Asked about the relationship between her psychiatric condition and her art, her handlers suggested the question was “too sensitive.”
But Ms. Kusama insisted on answering. “Since I was 10 years old I have been painting every day,” she said. “And even now there is not a day that I do not paint.” She added, “I still see polka dots everywhere.”