From her instagrammable Infinity Rooms to her UNIQLO sponsored Obliteration Room, Yayoi Kusama’s work appeals to everyone - art enthusiasts and young children alike. After over sixty years in the industry, Kusama remains as relevant as ever but who is she and what is it that makes her work so compelling?
Born in 1929, Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, performance, painting and textiles. The artist grew up in rural Japan with her family making their living by cultivating and growing seeds. Kusama expressed an interest in art from a very young age. However, this was not encouraged by her family. In fact, her mother in particular wanted her to be a traditional Japanese housewife. When the Second World War broke out, Kusama was still just a child, but like other school-aged children in her hometown, she was called to work, sewing parachutes for the Japanese army. Much of her childhood was defined by the war and the artist notes that it was these events that made her value notions of personal and creative freedom so strongly.
Against her family’s advice, she trained at Kyoto City University of Arts, studying traditional Japanese painting, but moved to the United States in 1958, quickly becoming a key part of the avant-garde scene in New York. During the 1960s, Kusama took part in and organised happenings across the city. These theatrical performances would come to be seen as forerunners of performance art. From writing an open letter to Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him if he would stop the Vietnam War to painting polka dots on naked performers, Kusama’s happenings were as impactful as they were outlandish.
It was also during this time that the artist started her Infinity Net series, a collection of hypnotic and alluring canvases that depict minimalist repeating patterns. The idea of geometric repetition, especially repeating dots, is central to her practice, and this motif has become synonymous with the artist herself. She describes her work as “self-obliteration”, stating that:
“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.”
Kusama’s fascination with repetition primarily stems from her own hallucinations. Throughout her life, the artist has been open about her struggles with mental health, explaining that her art acts as a form of therapy. From the age of ten, the artist experienced vivid visions of flashing light and dense fields of dots that multiply before her eyes. She replicates these occurrences in her artwork, tapping into her own raw and personal experience. The unique authenticity of her subject matter makes her work both captivating and universally accessible, which ultimately has contributed towards her continuing legacy.
In more recent years, Kusama’s ongoing success can be largely accounted for by the artist’s vote of approval by the Instagram generation. From her famous Infinity Rooms to scenery of giant brightly-coloured pumpkins, her work readily translates to viral TikToks and likeable posts. Her reoccurring use of mirrors - employed to aid complete ‘self-obliteration’ - ironically have become the perfect backdrop for influencers’ selfies. In 2018, her work had been hashtagged more than 300,000 times on Instagram and with her popularity steadily rising over the past four years, this figure is undoubtedly now much higher.
Whether it is the artist’s insta-worthy cult status or her authentic exploration of mental health that makes her so popular, it is indisputable that Yayoi Kusama is one of the most iconic artists of our time and will remain so for many years to come.
