Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto-shi, Nagano-Ken, Japan in 1929. Kusama is one of the most influential and widely collected artists of the 1960's and probably Japan's most famous and premiere artist of the modern era. Her art has been described as containing attributes including feminism, minimalism, abstract expressionism and pop art.
Kusama remembers growing up as an “unwanted child of unloving parents” and claimed that as a small child, her mother physically abused her. She studied at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. With a penchant for drawing and painting, Kusama plotted her escape to New York, USA, in 1958, in search of her hero, Georgia O'Keeffe.
Once there she began to create a life for herself as an artist. Kusama's paintings reflect childhood hallucinations, and her art has been an attempt to exorcise those demons. In the late 1950's, she began a series of Infinity Net Paintings that reflected with dots, nets and flowers her childhood affliction of suffering from repetitive hallucinations.
Early in Kusama's career, she began covering surfaces (walls, floors, canvases, and later, household objects and naked assistants) with the polka dots that would become a trademark of her work. The vast fields of polka dots, or "infinity nets," as she called them, were taken directly from her hallucinations.
Kusama became a colourful personality in the New York art world of the 1960's and has been described as an "outsider, eccentric, an obsessive, a femme fatale and a nonentity". In the early 1960’s when she first gained attention, she covered many of her canvases with webs and spots and created "Compulsion" furniture with stuffed phallic protuberances. These experiments with soft sculpture, mirrors and repetitive images preceded similar work by Claus Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, who she later collaborated with. In those years, she also did nude protests in which she would paint willing subjects, often with polka dots. In August of 1969 Kusama made the front page of the New York Daily News after infiltrating the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden with a bunch of naked co-conspirators to perform her “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead”.
However, she spent much of the decade in Europe, and was seemingly forgotten in America. She then moved to The Hague and in 1973 returned to Japan where she voluntarily committed herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she still lives, by choice, in a mental hospital while commuting to her Tokyo studio which is a short distance away. Kusama is often quoted as saying "If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago".
In 1998-99 a major retrospective exhibition of Kusama's work toured the US and Japan. In 2004, Kusama started her solo exhibition “KUSAMATRIX” at the Mori Museum in Tokyo. This exhibition drew a total of 520,000 visitors. In the same year, she started another solo exhibition at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In 2005, it travelled to The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto and the Matsumoto City Museum of Art. In 2006 Kusama decorated the whole of Orchard Road in Singapore with her signature polka dots, transforming the prominent street into an enormous installation. 2008 saw the release of the Documentary Film (Near Equal) series, the fifth installment. “Yayoi Kusama, I adore myself.”
