Channelling mental illness into art
DON’T ask Yayoi Kusama what’s been the highlight of her career. She might be 87 years old, internationally renowned and about to have major, simultaneous exhibitions in the United States and Japan, but she’s not done yet.
“It’s still coming. I’m going to create it in the future,” said Kusama, often described as Japan’s most successful living artist, at her studio in central Tokyo.
Kusama, who has a history of neurosis and has lived as a voluntary resident at a mental hospital a block away for about four decades, had been up at 3 am painting, partly because she couldn’t sleep and partly because she wanted to squeeze in time for work before the engine of Yayoi Kusama Inc started up for the day.
“I’m old now, but I am still going to create more work and better work. More than I have in the past,” she said. “My mind is full of paintings.”
Kusama works in her threestorey studio from 9 to 6 every day, sitting in her wheelchair – she can walk, but is frail – painting on canvases laid on tables or propped on the floor.
The studio is packed with paintings, works full of tiny dots. They’re all about what Kusama calls “self-obliteration” – the endless repetition silencing the noise in her head.
A new gallery across the road is ready to open, and another dedicated museum north of Tokyo is in the works. Plus, she has two major exhibitions about to begin.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, a retrospective of her 65year career, will open at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, on February 23, running until May 14 before moving to Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto and Cleveland.
The exhibition will feature more than 60 of Kusama’s paintings, sculptures and installations, along with six of her idiosyncratic “infinity mirror rooms” featuring balloons, LEDs and polka dots, all endlessly repeated in the mirrors.
“She is a pioneer first and foremost, as a female and Asian artist in the 1960s, transgressing painting, sculpture and performance,” said Mika Yoshitake, associate curator at the Hirshhorn. “These mirror rooms are works that reflect her ability to transgress the genres.”
One, a recreation of the mirror room called Phalli’s Field from 1965, features hundreds of white-and-red-spotted stuffed fabric penis creations. In another, the Obliteration Room, visitors will be invited to stick multicoloured polka dots all over a white living room.
“These rooms reflect all of her elements: her obsessions, her accumulations, her infinite repetitions. And it’s all very bodily and immersive,” Yoshitake said.
The day before this exhibition opens in Washington, another will open at the National Art Center in Tokyo.
Together, the exhibitions underscore the global phenomenon that is Yayoi Kusama.
Her polka dots cover everything from Louis Vuitton dresses to buses in her home town. Her artworks regularly fetch a million dollars, and can be found from New York and Minneapolis to London and Amsterdam. Her exhibitions are so popular that they need crowd control.
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, in the mountains of central Japan, in 1929 into a prosperous and conservative family of seedling merchants.
But theirs was not a happy home. Her mother had contempt for her womanising father and sent the young Kusama to spy on him. The girl saw her father with other women, sparking what she has described as a lifelong abhorrence of sex.
While still a child, she began experiencing “visual and aural hallucinations”.
The young Kusama dealt with her hallucinations by drawing, and by drawing repetitive patterns to “obliterate” the thoughts in her head. Even at that young age, art became a form of therapy.
But Kusama’s mother was vehemently opposed to her desire to become an artist, insisting that she follow a traditional path.
“She wouldn’t let me paint. She wanted me to marry someone,” Kusama said in an interview.
While living in Matsumoto, she had found a book by Georgia O’Keeffe and was struck by the paintings. So she went to the US Embassy in Tokyo and searched the “Who’s Who” reference publication for O’Keeffe’s address.
She sent her a letter and some paintings, and, “astoundingly”, O’Keeffe wrote back.
“I couldn’t believe my luck! She had been kind enough to respond to the sudden outburst of a lowly Japanese girl she’d never met or heard of before,” Kusama wrote in her autobiography, Infinity Net.
Despite O’Keeffe’s warnings that the US was a tough place for a young artist – let alone a young, female Japanese artist – Kusama wouldn’t be dissuaded.
In 1957 she managed to get a visa, and sewed dollars into her dresses to circumvent postwar currency controls.
First stop: Seattle, where she held an exhibition at a small gallery. Then she made her way to New York, where she had a rude awakening: “Unlike post-war Matsumoto, New York was in every way a fierce and violent place. I found it all extremely stressful and was soon mired in neurosis,” she wrote.
Making matters worse, she found herself in abject poverty. Her bed was an old door, and she scavenged fish heads and old vegetables from dumpsters and boiled them into soup.
But this situation made Kusama throw herself into her work even more. She began producing her first trademark Infinity Net paintings, huge canvases – one was 10 metres high – covered with mesmerising waves of small loops that seemed to go on and on. “White nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness”, is how she described them.
This obsessive-compulsive repetition helped stave off neurosis, but it didn’t always work. She repeatedly found herself suffering from psychotic episodes and ended up in a hospital in New York.
Ambitious and driven, she fell in with an influential artist crowd, hanging out with the likes of Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol.
She soon found a degree of fame, holding exhibitions in packed galleries. She also found – or rather, courted – notoriety.
In the 1960s, when her polka dot obsession was taking off, she began staging “happenings” around New York – enticing people to strip naked in such places as Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, then painting their bodies with polka dots.
Decades before the Occupy Wall Street movement, Kusama organised a happening in the New York financial district, declaring that she wanted to “Obliterate Wall Street men with polka dots”.
In the early 1970s, Kusama returned to Japan. She checked herself into the mental hospital where she still lives and fell into artistic obscurity.
Then, in 1989, the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York put on a retrospective of her work. This began a revival of interest in her art. She filled a mirrored room with pumpkins for the Venice Biennale in 1993, then in 1998 held a major show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – a venue where she’d once held a happening.
Kusama has become a global phenomenon in the past few years. The Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum in New York have held major retrospectives, drawing huge crowds, and her signature polka dots are immediately recognisable.
Despite the commercialisation of her art, she’s thinking about her grave in Matsumoto – not in the family plot; she’s had enough of them – and how to avoid making it a shrine.
“But I’m not dying yet,” she said, striking a more upbeat tone. “I think I can live another 20 years.”