Spotlight on: Yayoi Kusama

Let’s forget ourselves and become one with the universe.
Yayoi Kusama

This year’s Summer Exhibition at Globe pays homage to prolific artist Yayoi Kusama, whose high-colour, psychedelic artworks feature her trademark mesmeric dots. As a child, her parents ran a seed nursery and Kusama would while away hours drawing amongst the flowers that surrounded their family home. It was there that Kusama experienced her first hallucination, in which the flowers appeared to begin talking to her. Drawing was a way for Kusama to deal with her emerging mental health difficulties and cope with a turbulent homelife in rural Japan against the backdrop of World War 2; it soothed her. She knew she wanted to be an artist from a very young age. This angered her mother, who was keen for Kusama to become a housewife, and it was the source of much tension in their relationship.

Kusama rebelled and joined the art scene in New York in the late 1950’s. She arrived as a determined 27 year old, prompted by her extraordinary correspondence with established artist, Georgia O’Keefe, who she wrote to after happening upon a book of her paintings, enclosing some of her own work. In New York, Kusama drew and painted obsessively, covering surfaces in masses of dots. However, despite her pioneering style and persistent approach, she initially struggled to gain the fame and prominence she desired within the mostly male Pop Art scene. Kusama claims some of her counterparts adopted elements of her work which spurred them onto fame: in 1963, she fashioned 3-D stuffed fabric pieces which predate Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and she produced repetitive wallpaper prints before Andy Warhol. But Kusama was an outsider- a woman, and a Japanese artist in the Western world, with particular obsessive neuroses that informed her work- and this is an identity she has come to trade on. Her work in the latter part of the 1960’s helped to harden this reputation. During 1967 (the so-called ‘summer of love’), Kusama held events where she painted dots directly onto the nude bodies of willing volunteers and sold clothes with revealing holes in them. This gave her notoriety in America and her native Japan, where she was viewed as a deeply controversial artworld figure.

Kusama returned to Japan in the mid 1970’s, following the deaths of her close friend, the artist Joseph Cornell and soon after her father. She rented an apartment in Tokyo where her hallucinations returned. Now in her 90’s, Kusama continues to create in the psychiatric hospital where she has lived voluntarily for more than 40 years. She opened a large gallery of her own work in Tokyo in 2017. Her Infinity Rooms, (installations of mirrors and flickering lights) offer an immersive experience where the viewer can lose their sense of where they end and the artwork begins, in line with Kusama’s perspective as all of humanity as dots, on a planet that is a dot amongst other dots. In this sense, she believes, we are one.

Globe Arts Summer Exhibition 2022 runs from the 22nd -29th of August. There is an art market on Saturday 27th, with part of the proceeds going to Mission Huddersfield and Howard Asher Garden Gallery. Join us!