When I first met Yayoi Kusama in 1988, she had been living in a mental hospital in Tokyo for more than ten years and was almost forgotten by the New York art world. I was a graduate student studying postwar Japanese art, and I was invited to curate the opening exhibition of the Center for International Contemporary Art (CICA), a new institution in New York. I chose Yayoi Kusama, intent on pulling her out of obscurity.
When she passed away 37 years later last month, it was a paradox that Yayoi Kusama's life and art were overshadowed by her fame.
She died in Tokyo at the age of 97, and tributes poured in. By all accounts, she lived in New York before moving back to Tokyo in 1973, where she played an important role in the 1960s avant-garde art movements of Minimalism and Pop Art. They also point to the renaissance of her artistic career in her later years: record-breaking auction prices for a female artist, long queues in front of her mirrored immersive installations, and her signature polka-dot luxury collections, which she designed twice for Louis Vuitton.
Kusama's madness is part of her legend, but mental illness does not equal artistic talent, and the results are not always artistic. Various accounts of Kusama—my own included—tend to interpret her work through a psychologically distorted lens. There's truth to that, but it's not that distortion that makes the artist who he is.
Yayoi Kusama’s reputation in recent decades has obscured our appreciation for the intense rage and original genius that drive her to make art, and keep doing it. This reputation also ignores the fact that from her early years, male artists had been preying on her creativity. Her work appears to have inspired Claes Oldenburg's bulging quilted sculptures, Andy Warhol's repeated images as wallpaper, and Lucas Samaras's interactive mirrored rooms.
The first time I met Yayoi Kusama was in a coffee shop in Tokyo. With me were Bhupendra Karia, director of the International Center for Contemporary Art, and Reiko Tomii, head of research. Yayoi Kusama walks very fast, with a slightly stooped body, like a penguin. Her eyes were intense; she wore thick lipstick, a little eyeliner and blush. The forehead wrinkles are deep. She leans forward as she speaks, reeling off stories, betrayals, triumphs and convictions in rapid-fire English, often omitting verbs and tenses. Occasionally, she would look up at us and smile, as if a bird was perching in her sight. In those moments, I saw her beauty. Her Japanese was similarly choppy, barely a conversation. But she always spoke with absolute certainty.
We were the first academics to open the door to her studio, which was near the mental hospital where she had lived voluntarily since 1977. The room was filled with suitcases emblazoned with Pan Am logos and painted with polka dots. Every shelf was crammed with hat boxes and shoe boxes, and racks of paintings, many still rolled, as if they had been shipped from New York so many years ago. What we found in the box became the source of portraits, artworks, and performance photographs that were part of the global Kusama craze—including material from her participation in the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, when she curated the unauthorized Narcissus Garden project as a protest against the commercialization of the art market. Dressed in a gold kimono, she placed 1,500 mirrored plastic balls on the lawn and sold them for $2 each. (The organizers then asked her to leave.)
Since then, major museums have mounted increasingly large retrospectives, and her work has been included in hundreds of group shows, including some I curated myself.
But along the way, something got lost: where she came from, what drives her.
Yayoi Kusama grew up in a conservative family during the wartime Japanese military regime. Her mother was very opposed to her doing art and would sneak up from behind and snatch away her sketches. She also had a philandering father and suffered sexual trauma early in her life. Her family grew flowers for their wholesale seed business. Those swirling little flowers are one of the sources of Kusama’s obsession with the ever-proliferating “net” of dots.
In the early 1950s, a Japanese psychiatrist called Yayoi Kusama a "genius female artist with schizophrenic tendencies." Since then, she has described the effects of her visual and auditory hallucinations as "self-dissolution" - dissolution into nothingness. Creating thousands of objects saved her from complete despair and possible suicide.
In 1958, the 29-year-old Yayoi Kusama came to New York—only 16 years after the Pearl Harbor incident and only 13 years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Newspapers still refer to her countrymen as "Japs." She never married and left Japan to get rid of the "shackles, stereotypes and prejudices" there. She said Japan was "too narrow, too submissive, too feudal and too dismissive of women" for artists to develop there.
Yayoi Kusama's desire for recognition stems from her anger against obstacles such as patriarchy, militarism, and herd mentality. After arriving in the United States, she added anger against the art world dominated by male artists. In 1968, she competed with Andy Warhol for public attention, and she won. It wasn’t Warhol she wanted to defeat, but the system she wanted to rebel against. In her occasional anti-Vietnam War performance art, she painted naked hippies with polka dots to symbolize cosmic love, intended to dissolve the ego rather than show off the body. In 1968, when Richard Nixon was elected president, she wrote in an open letter to him: "Let us forget ourselves, dearest Richard, and become one with the Absolute, and all come together to meet each other in sincerity."
After returning to Tokyo in 1973, Kusama became a youth culture icon. Domestically, Yayoi Kusama is one of the most culturally influential women in modern history.
Globally, Yayoi Kusama’s most iconic series is the Infinity Mirrored Room. She first presented this series of works in 1965 and returned to the theme in the 1990s, creating increasingly larger kaleidoscopic environments into which only one visitor could enter at a time. These “immersive artworks” have become the art world’s playground. People often queue up to enter, but few come to appreciate the artist’s original vision, to experience her innermost fears, or to stare at their own infinitely divided reflections. Instead, they just went to take selfies.
If Yoko Ono is, as John Lennon said, "the world's most famous unknown artist," then Yayoi Kusama is the world's most unknown famous artist.
