Yayoi Kusama, Red Polka Dots and Flowers
Midori Yoshimoto
Visit Yayoi Kusama in her studio in Tokyo and you’ll find her at several canvases, simultaneously, motivated to give to each at the same moment. This working process, often in a series, is partly captured in her recent exhibition at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art. Born in 1929, Kusama spent her childhood and adolescence in Matsumoto city, the capital of Nagano prefecture, located in central Japan and once host of the winter Olympic Games. The people of her hometown, along with art professionals across the country, welcomed Kusama warmly at the exhibition’s opening, the situation which can be perfectly described by the Japanese expression, "kokyo ni nishiki o kazaru," meaning the act of bringing home a trophy.
Her memory of her early days in Matsumoto is not necessarily pleasant, however. Kusama’s parents strongly resisted her interest in art, especially her mother, who would tear up Yayoi’s drawings as soon as she found them. Along with the oppressive social atmosphere before and during World War II, her hardship at home led her to develop hallucinations in which she saw herself separated from the rest of the world by an infinitely growing net. Her signature motifs of the cobweb-like net, and its negative polka dots started as small-scale water color paintings and quickly evolved into wall-size canvases in her early New York years, and further into body-painting happenings in the late 60s. Never satisfied with the conservative Japanese art world, Kusama left her mother country for New York on the occasion of having a solo exhibition in Seattle.
Based in New York City throughout the 1960s, Kusama’s art rapidly gained popularity in the international art community, mainly in the United States and Europe. Her numerous press clippings, claims of receiving more attention from the media than Warhol, and body-painting happenings in the late 1960s all are evidence of her appeal. After she returned to Japan in 1972, her fame gradually faded and was not restored until the late 1990s when retrospective exhibitions of her work were held at such major institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Since then, there has been something close to a craze around Kusama in the international art world.
The Japanese art world was late to recognize such growing impact of Kusama’s art, perhaps a reluctance to recognize the talent until she fulfilled the act of return. Because the Japanese media scandalized Kusama’s happenings in the late 1960s, she was once ostracized by most of her family and friends in Matsumoto City. The most recent tour of the Kusama retrospective to three venues in Japan concluded most appropriately in that native town, Matsumoto. The subtitle for this particular version of the exhibition, "The Place for My Soul," reveals Kusama’s yearning to communicate just that to her hometown. Perhaps the town and she both have has finally fulfilled that dream.
This full-fledged exhibition turns the whole museum into a Kusama world. Visitors were welcomed by gigantic flower sculptures outside, and then surrounded by red polka dots attached to the floor, glass walls, and big balloons from the ceiling of the museum’s interior. In another direction, they could find Kusama’s seminal installation piece, Narcissus Garden, consisting of hundreds of mirror balls, that are displayed on the second floor hallway and spill out into the outdoor courtyard. Although the same exhibition had traveled to four other venues including Tokyo’s Musuem of Modern Art and the Kumamoto Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition at Matsumoto stands alone in terms of space and number of works. New additions included nearly forty works on paper from Kusama’s early period which had rarely been shown before, and a dozen of playful black-marker paintings completed recently in last few years. The latter series is part of her ongoing work which might be shown in New York in 2006. Even though this artist may have already attained the best possible fame as a working artist of any nation, she never ceases to create new works. Kusama’s incessant work attitude is promise that these will continue to dazzle the generations, worldwide.
