The concept for the Yayoi Kusama retrospective exhibition, which opened at the National Gallery of Victoria last week, might not be a unique curatorial take on the famous 95-year-old artist but it is moving.
Kusama claimed to have had hallucinations as a child when looking at flowers in the plant nursery where she lived in country Japan. The logic of this has been extended into a profound and moving search for the loss of self in the infinite quality of nature.
Kusama now lives in a small hospital room, attended regularly by her gallerist and members of the Kusama Studio, where she paints on a daily basis, still searching for the patterns of nature in lively colour.
Her contentious life trajectory, marred by suicidal thoughts, is married in this show with developments in art history such as the first installation in New York of her Infinity Mirror Room in the 1960s and the brilliant opportunities for painters in the 1980s with large canvasses.
Eight decades is a long career, and like other female artists trying to make light out of dark, there is a sadness in her work, particularly in the first tentative grids of dots in 1953.
This retrospective allows the viewer to straddle the old with the new as those first ideas are brought through painting, sculpture, fashion and performance into the digital age and expanded in a great illusionist feat in immersive rooms that have become so popular for Instagram-posting visitors.
Kusama began with training in traditional Japanese painting. Her early works are lovely little gouaches with a good feel for line and mood. In New York, she had her first solo show of her abstract compositions in 1959 at Brata Gallery.
With names such as Pacific Ocean and Infinity Nets, the paintings demonstrate her early interest in surfaces. The works are subdued and minimalist, using repetition in paint and collage to explore infinity. One collector called this “quality in quantity”.
In New York, Kusama also got into fashion, making see-through outfits and cut-away dresses that inspired her later, amusing Orgy dress, for four people.
“I’d heard about her in 80’s Tokyo,” said collector and gallerist Hidenori Otisan, speaking about his first impressions of her. “She was an almost famous person. I didn’t know if she was an artist or comedian. She was in the underground scene.”
The photographic evidence is that Kusama enjoyed herself in New York and hooned around at happenings, enjoying the freedom of the sexual revolution. She was invited to instal her first infinity room there at Gertrude Stein Gallery.
After returning to Japan in the 1970s, she had a breakdown. Her father died and her time in New York had been lonely as well as liberating. She stood on top of the Empire State building and said I need to make something out of this “fierce and lonely place”.
She published a semi-autobiographical novel Manhattan Suicide Addict, which is still available in print, and recently read a poem that refers to these ideas in a video.
Kusama really came into her own in the 1980s with graphic paintings of teaming life such as Soul Burning Flashes and penis-like shapes made out of cloth, creating creatures to represent the power of nature.
“I first met her when I was looking for part-time work and answered an ad for using a sewing machine,” says Studio worker Takako Fujibayashi, also in Melbourne. “She is a very original person. Apparently even in primary school a lot of people knew her.”
“The things she tells me … she aims to be at the top of the mountain. When she gets to the top of the mountain she wants to make the mountain higher.”
Kusama was the first solo artist to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and her luminous explorations of the pumpkin began in 1991, culminating in the famous dancing pumpkin, a new installation at the NGV.
The artist’s global fame was consolidated in the twenty-first century after collaborating with Louis Vuitton. A collector Kim Camacho, who lent ten works for the exhibition, posed for AAR in her infinity dots outfit.
Kusama is an artist who has not been afraid to embrace the personality culture of the current moment and her followers are enjoying the limelight.
“I was working at the Fuji Television Gallery as a 28 year-old,” said Otisan. “I had no sales power so I checked the sales result of the gallery. It was $US80,000 for a year. Sam Sam made $40,000 of that. That was the late ‘80s.” Two years ago he paid $US450,000 for one of her 1950s collages.
Yayoi Kusama
NGV International, St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Exhibition continues to 21 April 2025
Entry fees apply
For more information, visit: www.ngv.melbourne for details.
Images: Yayoi Kusama – photo by Yusuke Miyazaki | Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light, 2024 on display in the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne © YAYOI KUSAMA – photo by Sean Fennessy | Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe, 2019 on display in the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne © YAYOI KUSAMA – photo by Sean Fennessy | Installation view of the Orgy Dress, 2002, as part of the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne. © YAYOI KUSAMA – photo by Kate Shanasy | Kim Camacho – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge