Yayoi Kusama Biography
Yayoi Kusama is 82 years old. But when she is wheeled in, on her blue polka-dotted wheelchair, she looks more like a baby, the sort you might see played by an adult in a British pantomime. Her face is large for a Japanese woman and at odds with her smallish frame. Apart from her intense, saucer-shaped eyes and the arc of deep red lipstick across her mouth, there is something masculine about her features. She wears a lurid red wig and a dress covered in engorged polka dots. Coiled around her neck is a long red scarf decorated with worm-like black squiggles. When she is out of the spotlight, without her splashy red wig and garish outfits, she looks like a nice, grey-haired old lady. But in public situations Kusama’s art and Kusama the artist converge. It is as if the patterns she has obsessively replicated since childhood have seeped off the canvas and into the three-dimensional world of flesh and blood.
Rarely has an artist so clearly articulated the art of the Sixties as the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The significance of her work has to do with the specific time period in which she grew up and her perception of art is determined by an inner energy. Her work also transcends earlier established and traditional border lines between disciplines of art and between art and life itself. Kusama’s career is rooted in her Japanese origin. Born in Matsumoto in 1929 she studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Kyoto. In 1957 she moved to New York, which was at the time the world center of contemporary. This move was based on her early awareness that only in New York could she continue her development as a contemporary artist. During the years she lived in New York it become apparent that compared to the conventional image of the Japanese woman, she was a human dynamo of creative energies and abundant human resources. The results of these first years in the art of Kusama were large paintings, one of them 33 feet long, of white nets which, without center and compositional
Rarely has an artist so clearly articulated the art of the Sixties as the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The significance of her work has to do with the specific time period in which she grew up and her perception of art is determined by an inner energy. Her work also transcends earlier established and traditional border lines between disciplines of art and between art and life itself. Kusama’s career is rooted in her Japanese origin. Born in Matsumoto in 1929 she studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Kyoto. In 1957 she moved to New York, which was at the time the world center of contemporary. This move was based on her early awareness that only in New York could she continue her development as a contemporary artist. During the years she lived in New York it become apparent that compared to the conventional image of the Japanese woman, she was a human dynamo of creative energies and abundant human resources. The results of these first years in the art of Kusama were large paintings, one of them 33 feet long, of white nets which, without center and compositional
Bibliography: Chadwick, Whitney, and Dawn Ades. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self- representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998. Kusama, Yayoi, and Lynn Zelevansky. Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998. Kusama, Yayoi. Yayoi Kusama: Recent Works. New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1996. Kusama, Yayoi, and David Moos. Yayoi Kusama: Early Drawings from the Collection of Richard Castellane. Birmingham, Ala.: Birmingham Museum of Art, 2000. Kusama, Yayoi, and Bhupendra Karia. Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective. New York: Center for International Contemporary Arts, 1989. Pollock, Griselda. Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006.