Contemporary Artist: Yayoi Kusama

No. Red B, 1960, Oil On Canvas

Kusama began painting as a child about the time she began experiencing hallucinations that often evolved fields of dots. Those hallucinations and the theme of dots would continue to inform her art through her career.

Her early work included what she called “infinity net" paintings- that consisted of thousands of tiny marks repeated across large canvases as if they continued into infinity. This period of her work anticipated the emerging Minimalism movement, but her work soon transitioned to Pop art and Performance art.

Infinity Mirror Room Phalli's Field (1965)

Obsessive repetition continued to be a theme in Kusama’s sculpture and installation art. The theme of sexual anxiety liked her work, in which she covered the surface of objects.

Installations include this mirrored room where the floors were covered with hundreds of stuffed phalli, painted with red dots. 

Using mirrors gave her the opportunity to create infinite planes in her installations, and she would continue to use them in later pieces.

Her work on these themes continue and she begins to use public nudity, with the stated intention of disassembling boundaries of identity, sexuality, and the body. 

Kusama moved back to Japan in 1973 and from 1977, by her own choice, she lived in a mental hospital. She continued to produce art during that period and also wrote surreal poetry and fiction.

Mirror Room (Pumpkin), 1991

In 1989 Kusama returned to the international art world with shows. In 1993 she created work that included this installation in which she filled a mirrored room with pumpkin sculptures covered in her signature dots.

In her creation, Kusama uses aspects of her mental illness to welcome participants to experience her psychological space.

The instillation included a yellow colored space, floor to ceiling with a black polka dots pattern. In the middle of the space stood a mirror cube ( with a peep hole on it in a manner 1965 Peep Show (Kusama, 1978) . Through that window the viewer could gaze on what seemed to be an infinite field of these papier mâché pumpkins, the same yellow and black polka dot design as the exterior gallery.

Kusama was diagnosed with “atypical psychosis”, which resulted in schizophrenia and irritability (Kusama, 2002). Her mental disease came from her “Childhood trauma” which inspired her work a physical representation of her fears- she created infinite dots to escape from visual hallucination and made phallic soft sculptures to suppress the fear of sexual-relation. This is also evident in her work with pumpkins. She once said that “Dot is a symbol of life.” Dots like cells, eggs and sperms, are the smallest units of organisms. These units pile up tissues, organs, and living bodies. Since the sexual organs are tools for reproduction, Kusama uses also uses the polka dots pattern on Phallic works to give them the meaning of breeding, living and regeneration. Because a pumpkins' segment is very similar to phallic size and shape they become a symbol.