The Life of Yayoi Kusama
A Visual Chronology
‘The gap between me, and my parents and society was maddeningly irritating and unreasonable. Probably I already had the sense of despair all about me and the world around me when I was in my mother’s womb.’
— Yayoi Kusama
Early Years in Japan
1929
Kusama is born on 22 March in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
Her family operates a successful plant nursery in Matsumoto, selling primarily seeds, seedlings, and flowers. The business offered relative financial stability to the Kusama family during the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s.
1930s
Kusama grows up in the beautiful Japanese Alps. Her love of nature, together with a sense of alienation from her conservative environment, drive her towards art as a young child. Several extant childhood drawings show objects and people covered in polka dots.
‘During the dark days of war when I felt I could no longer go on as a young girl, behind my house was a river upon which lay millions of white stones, the basis for a mysterious vision confirming their ‘being’ one by one under the glistening sun. Aside from this direct revelation from nature, I was also possessed by a strange world inside my psyche with images of an immaterial drive.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1944
Kusama is conscripted to work in a parachute factory in November alongside many of her high-school classmates. She becomes ill with pneumonia from the poor working conditions, but also learns to sew—a skill that will later become important in her work. She has described the discovery of her creative obsession as an outlet during these difficult times:
‘Painting pictures seemed to be the only way to let me survive in this world, and was rather like an outburst of my passion in desperation.’
1945
Kusama, who is sixteen years old, creates Harvest, one of her earliest surviving artworks. It depicts millet and corn, which are widespread substitutes for rice in Japan during post-war shortages.
1948–1950
Kusama’s parents disapprove of her desire to become an artist but allow her to move to Kyoto to attend the Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō, a preparatory school for the Kyoto University of the Arts. Kusama’s surviving sketchbooks from this time contain many life studies of animals and plants, but she is frustrated by the conservative nature of her education and begins to teach herself oil painting.
‘I would be more than happy as an artist, if my little piece of art could, in some way or another, reach out to as many people as possible, and eventually act as a means to cultivate critical eyes.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1948–1950
In the aftermath of the war, art materials remain expensive, and many of Kusama’s earliest works in oil, including Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization) and Earth of Accumulation (both 1950), are painted on jute-seed sacks or cardboard instead of canvas.
1952
In March, just before her twenty-third birthday, Kusama’s first solo exhibition is held at the First Community Centre in Matsumoto. Featuring more than one hundred drawings and paintings, the show includes Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization), but under a different title.
‘For art like mine—art that does battle at the border of life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die—[Japan] was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1955
Kusama takes part in her first exhibition in the United States, the International Watercolor Exhibition, 18th Biennial, organised by the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In November, she writes to American artists Kenneth Callahan and Georgia O’Keeffe, expressing admiration for their work and asking for guidance on securing a solo exhibition in their country.
1957
Kusama destroys most of her work before leaving for America.
‘I plan to create revolutionary work that will overturn the art world. This will show the New York art world a decisive direction for the future.’
— Yayoi Kusama
An Avant-garde in New York
1958
Kusama arrives in New York in the summer. She rents a studio space in the East Village and begins to make new, larger oil paintings that she hopes will make an impact within the New York scene The artist’s new, all-white paintings were inspired by the patterns of the Pacific Ocean as seen during her flight from Japan. Later that year, O’Keeffe visits New York and meets with Kusama in her studio.
1959
Kusama has her first solo exhibitions in New York, at Brata Gallery, and Boston, at Nova Gallery. At both exhibitions, she debuts a series of paintings that will later be known as Infinity Nets. Tiny loops are painted in white over a black background, uniformly covering the canvas in a net-like pattern. A thin wash of white over the top makes the impression even more subtle, so that the paintings appear like blank canvases from a distance, while close up they reveal thick, organic accumulations of paint. The works are a notable critical success, garnering positive reviews in numerous publications. Many critics interpret the all-over abstractions as an expression of Eastern or ‘Zen’ aesthetics, but are also impressed by their subtle nuance and systematic restraint.
‘I work as much as fifty to sixty hours at a stretch. I gradually feel myself under the spell of the accumulation and repetition in my “nets” which expand beyond myself, and over the limited space of canvas covering the floor, desks and everywhere; all of the universe which is actually visible.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1961
Kusama’s first solo exhibition at Stephen Radich Gallery in New York includes the 10-metre-long Infinity Net painting , which is larger than any of Jackson Pollock’s monumental poured paintings. The critical response is tepid, however, with Stuart Preston writing in the New York Times that ‘economy of means leads to economy of results’. Disappointed by a lack of resultant sales and exhibition opportunities, Kusama explores new media. She creates Accumulation of Letters, a repetitive collage of her own name cut from leftover postcards for her November 1960 solo exhibition at Gres Gallery in Washington DC, possibly as a wry reflection on self-promotion.
No. H. Red
1961
Kusama made some of her Infinity Nets paintings, including this one, titled No. H. Red, by painting on a canvas laid over a large flat table. She propped larger pieces against the wall in her New York studio and worked standing on a stepladder.
As you look at the painting, imagine the repetitive movements of Kusama’s hand as she worked on the entire surface. Envision how she developed textures by varying the thickness of the paint. With looping brushwork, Kusama created an intricate lace-like red pattern on a dark background.
If you shift your focus to the negative spaces between the individual loops that form the ‘net’, the black background starts to emerge.
It appears like a field of tiny dots. With this inverse relationship, you can see how the net and the dots are interconnected. To Kusama, the interrelationship between the dots and the net represents the boundless universe and our position within it.
Painting can be physically demanding, and Kusama was obsessed with creating. Sometimes, she painted continuously for three or four days without sleeping.
In addition to losing her sense of time, Kusama’s connection to reality frayed. She recalled waking up one day to find her infinity nets stuck on the windows. As she reached to touch them, the net appeared to crawl onto her hands. These hallucinations led to repeated hospitalisations.
1962
Kusama produces her first major sculptures by covering pieces of furniture with stuffed-fabric protuberances, painted white, producing monstrous but recognisable forms. The repetitive form of the sculptures echoes the repetitive motif of the looping net in her paintings. Two early examples of this series are an armchair (Accumulation No. 1) and a couch (Accumulation No. 2), both of which are shown at Green Gallery in New York, in a group show later considered to be one of the formative exhibitions of the Pop movement.
1963
Kusama writes to her Washington DC dealer, Beatrice Perry, saying that she wants to create an ‘Accumulation Room’, or an installation of all her objects covered in soft sculpture, inspired in part by Claes Oldenberg’s installation The Store (1961). Later the same year, she has a solo show at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York featuring her first immersive installation, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show. At the centre of the exhibition space sits a rowing boat covered in soft sculptural forms, one of her largest Accumulation sculptures to date. Surrounding the boat on the walls, floor, and ceiling of the exhibition space are 999 screen prints depicting the sculpture itself, which create a dizzying, repetitive impression.
‘I find myself being put into a uniform environment, one which is strangely mechanised and standardised… In the gap between people and the strange jungle of civilised society lies many psychosomatic problems. I am always deeply interested in the background of problems involved in the relationship of people and society. My artistic expressions always grow from the aggregation of these.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1964
Kusama suffers from severe anxiety and exhaustion as she continues to produce her labour-intensive Accumulation sculptures at a rapid pace. Her April solo exhibition, Driving Image Show, at Richard Castellane Gallery in New York, is conceived as a total environment of her artistic vision and labour. Not only is the gallery filled with aggregation sculptures approximating a domestic environment, but also the walls are hung with net paintings, and macaroni is strewn across the floor.
1965
Kusama’s work is exhibited in Stockholm (a group show at Moderna Museet), Amsterdam, The Hague, and Bern. She is invited by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana to be part of the group exhibitions he is curating in Milan and Venice within the network of the ‘New Tendencies’, an international avantgarde movement characterised by experimental media including installation and optical art, as well as concern for spatial dynamics. However, it is her November solo show at Richard Castellane Gallery in New York that features Kusama’s most experimental work to date: a mirrored installation entitled Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field. The mirrors multiply her sculptural forms in an infinite optical regress. With this work, the integration of performance and self-image in Kusama’s practice is also heightened, as seen in the dramatic portraits of the artist inside the installation, taken by Tokyo-based avant-garde photographer Eikoh Hosoe at Kusama’s studio.
‘When people see their own reflection multiplied to infinity they then sense that there is no limit to man’s ability to project himself into endless space.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1966
In March, Kusama’s Peep Show / Endless Love Show opens at Richard Castellane Gallery in New York . The work features a single hexagonal chamber lined entirely with mirrors on the inside that reflect flashing carnival lights. By peering through the peep holes on the chamber’s sides, viewers encounter a cosmic scene described by critic Peter Schjeldahl as ‘a depthless, receding blaze of lights—in the farthest distance a shimmering Milky Way’.
In June, Kusama creates her first outdoor installation, Narcissus Garden, an unofficial display at the Venice Biennale. Lucio Fontana provides financial support for the work, which consists of 1,500 mirrored plastic balls displayed on the grass outside the Italian pavilion. Kusama sold the balls for two US dollars each, a low price intended as a critique of the art market’s escalating prices. Biennale organisers draw the line, telling Kusama that she must stop selling art ‘like hot dogs or ice cream cones’.
‘My performances are a kind of symbolic philosophy with polka-dots.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1967
Kusama begins to produce multimedia performances based on her emergent concept of self-obliteration. In June, she hosts an event called Self-Obliteration: An Audio-Visual Light Performance at the Black Gate Theater, an experimental venue in New York City’s East Village neighbourhood that forms an important node of the international expanded cinema movement. Models dance in silver bikinis as Kusama paints their bodies with Day-Glo polka dots that become fluorescent under strobing blacklights. Throughout the summer, Kusama holds a series of public body-painting performances (Body Festivals) in New York’s Tompkins Square and Washington Square parks.
Kusama collaborates with Jud Yalkut on an experimental film entitled Kusama’s Self-Obliteration.
1968
Kusama stages dozens of happenings in public locations in New York and in her own studio. In most of these performances, the artist paints polka dots on nude performers. The happenings scandalise the invited news media, and on several occasions Kusama and her performers are detained by police for public indecency.
Self-Obliteration
1966–1974
Looking at this installation, you might imagine that one of Kusama’s Infinity Nets has exploded off the wall, speckling every nearby person and object with multi-coloured dots.
Kusama made Self-Obliteration in the late 1960s when she was living in New York and actively participating in the counterculture. Kusama led dozens of happenings during which she painted dots onto performers’ naked bodies. The polka dot–covered mannequins represent an extension of this practice.
If you look closely, you can notice that the mannequins, all female, sport wigs styled to reflect the fashions of the late 1960s.
The intense and someone ominous title of this work, Self-Obliteration, contrasts playfully with the colourful scene before our eyes. Kusama has explored the concept of ‘obliteration’ throughout her career. It is rooted in the idea of the negative and positive becoming one. Kusama has said:
‘Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots we become part of the unity of our environments.’
When we look at this work we see the way the individuals represented by the mannequins appear to become parts of a larger whole.
Return to Japan
1973–1974
Kusama moves to Tokyo at the start of 1973. Kusama also struggles psychologically as she processes the death not only of Joseph Cornell but also of her father, Kamon, who dies in June 1974.
1975
Nonetheless, she opens a solo exhibition in December at Tokyo’s Nishimura Gallery featuring a new series of mixed-media works on paper. They are intimate works that, in their small scale, most closely recall her mystical abstractions of the early 1950s. Incorporating many cut-out images of animals and plants, they seem in part a homage to Cornell, who was known for his intimate photocollages. In a later interview reflecting on this pivotal shift in her work, Kusama connects the lyrical intimacy of the collages to her depression, the cultural differences between New York and Japan, and her emerging writing practice: ‘In Japan, I write poetry. In New York, there was no mood for poetry; every day was a struggle with the outside world.’
Now That You’ve Died (For My Late Parents), 1975
Now that you’ve died
your soul, above cotton-rose clouds
mingles with powedered [sic] rainbow light
and disappears forever
And you and I
at the end of our endless battles
of love and hatred
have parted
never to meet again
To me, born a child of people
parting is like the quiet footsteps
on the path of flowers
Beyond the clouds of sunset
a soundless hush
Handwritten on verso of Now That You Died, 1975; translated by Ralph McCarthy
‘I am very dissatisfied with American art. Although it has opened up new genres or new categories, and has contributed to the art of the world, it is backed by American nationalism … and I am against that materialistic culture which considers art as something to be consumed, a commodity.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1976–1977
Nearly four years after her return to Japan, Kusama looks back on the American art world critically, expressing frustration with its nationalism and consumerism. She now embraces her role as an avant-garde artist in Japan. Feeling that contemporary Japanese art remains highly conservative and culturally undervalued, she desires to lead a change in this area. She begins creating large-scale sculptures again, holding a solo exhibition at Osaka Formes Gallery in Tokyo in 1976.
‘I cannot give up my existence. Also I cannot escape from death. This languid weight of life!’
— Yayoi Kusama
1980–1981
Kusama has seven solo exhibitions between 1980 and 1981, including The Puzzle Art of Yayoi Kusama at the Seibu Department Store in Shibuya, Tokyo. These stores became an important site for international art in Japan in 1961, when the flagship store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, hosted an exhibition of work by the European Expressionist Paul Klee.
Kusama is selected for several major group shows that further solidify her place in the narrative of Japanese art, including The 1960s—A Decade of Change in Contemporary Art, organised by the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo in 1981. The show features several works by Kusama, including the three-panelled Net Accumulation (1958), which subsequently enters the collection of the National Museum of Art, Osaka.
1982
Kusama begins exhibiting at Tokyo’s Fuji Television Gallery in 1982 with an eponymous solo exhibition of old and new works, her largest gallery show since returning to Japan.
1983–1984
Kusama stages her first successful happening in Japan in February 1983 at Video Gallery SCAN in Tokyo. Titled Self-Obliteration, it is screened on Japanese television and named by NHK (Japan’s public television network) as one of the year’s most notable art events. In her second solo show at Fuji Television Gallery, in 1984, she debuts new paintings and sculptures of pumpkins, as well a new series of soft sculptures. Her characteristic ‘phallic’ sculptural forms no longer encrust recognisable pieces of furniture but instead are conglomerated into biomorphic figures like monstrous plants, marking a clear departure from her earlier Accumulations.
1985
In April, Kusama stages a happening titled Flowers of Basara in the cherry orchard at Jōshin-ji Temple (Kuhonbutsu) in Tokyo, her first public outdoor performance in about a decade. It was commissioned by Tadashi Yokoyama, professor of architecture at Tokyo University, to reinterpret the fourteenth-century celebration of cherry blossoms by the extravagant lord Dōyo Sasaki. Dressed in flowing red robes, Kusama weaves a huge ‘web’ of red and white plastic streamers around blossoming cherry trees in a symbolic gesture of sumptuous interconnectedness.
Images above: Flowers of Basara (stills), performance at Kuhonbutsu Jōshin-ji temple, Tokyo, 1985. Digital video (colour, silent), 1 min. 20 sec. Collection of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA
‘The world is contaminated with nuclear power, wars and violence. I wish to leave behind the evidence for the future that we did our utmost as artists to shine in this polluted world.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1987
Kusama’s first retrospective, organised by Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, opens in March. Featuring seventy-nine works from 1948 to the present, the exhibition is received positively by the Japanese media, increasing public familiarity with her work.
Imagery of Human Beings
1987
Titled Imagery of Human Beings, this painting expresses Kusama’s view of our interconnected existence. Round white dots of various sizes cover a purple field. Most of the dots have tiny tails that are sometimes linked to other white dots. Each dot might resemble tadpoles or sperms.
If you step back to view it, the composition could be an image of a galaxy. Scanning the work from left to right you can see how the density of the dots varies from panel to panel: the dots on the left are larger and closely spaced. As you move your eyes across the panels, the dots seem to disperse, adding to an impression of movement. Let your eyes roam in this field of dots and lines.
If you think of a single dot as representing one life, this work could be understood as a larger image of cosmic oneness in which we are all connected. The Buddhist concept of reincarnation informs Kusama’s worldview. Buddhist teaching describes how we have lived countless lives from beginningless time. This also means we have all been related to everyone else over the course of our many lifetimes. Looking at this painting, you might feel that our lives are just a moment in a longer existence, like a speck of dust in the galaxies.
For Kusama, the dot is charged with spiritual significance. She often refers to the form as ‘polka dot’, which symbolises a spirit of rebirth generated through transformation of energy and constant movement. Says Kusama:
‘Polka-dots can’t stay alone. Like the communicative life of people, two or three and more polka-dots become movement. Our earth is only one polka-dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka-dots are a way to infinity.’
As you look again at this painting, Imagery of Human Being, what kind of image does Kusama offer? It is a representation of cosmic oneness. In the same way all living beings are made up of cells, the whole of humanity is part of one being, and the entire universe in one single cell.
Global Culture Icon
1989
Kusama’s first international retrospective, organised by the Center for International Contemporary Arts (CICA) in New York, opens in September and asserts her influence on American art in the 1960s. Curator Alexandra Munroe evaluates Kusama’s status as both an influential insider and an eccentric outsider in relation to international contemporary art movements.
‘If there is a chance that in 100 years’ time, there will be just one person who will look at my work and be touched by it, then I must continue to create art for that person.’
— Yayoi Kusama
1991–1992
Kusama’s Fuji Television Gallery show Between Heaven and Earth presents Mirror Room (Pumpkin), the first mirror room that Kusama has created since the 1960s. While retaining her characteristic all-over abstraction, new paintings such as Sex Obsession (1992) also feature more complex motifs reminiscent of biological patterns.
Shooting Stars
1992
Let your eyes roam between the rectangular frames that make up this giant installation, titled Shooting Stars. Kusama filled each of the eighty-four frames with hand-sewn fabric sacs that extend in all directions, taking over this orderly structure as if they are wild parasitic vines. The silvery entangling forms resemble synapses within the nervous system and evoke a flow of electric currents. The assemblage forms an expanding universe. It can represent something as small as cells and as big as the stars in the sky.
After returning to Japan from New York in 1973, Kusama focused on coping with psychological distress and deteriorating mental health. However, she gradually embraced her identity as a leading figure in Japan’s avant-garde and received increasing attention from the international art world in the 1980s.
She created this work in 1992, one year before she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, the most important recurring global exhibition. The installation seems to radiate energy, symbolising her ambition and explosive creativity.
1993
At the forty-fifth Venice Biennale, Kusama is the first artist to have a solo exhibition in the Japanese pavilion. Commissioner Akira Tatehata includes some important works of the 1960s while emphasising Kusama’s ongoing innovation with a selection of recent biomorphic sculptures and Mirror Room (Pumpkin) (1991/1992). Tatehata describes the exhibition as ‘an attempt to accurately reassess the quality of [Kusama’s] achievement without undue emphasis on her legendary eccentricity’.
1994
Kusama installs her first permanent outdoor sculpture, Pumpkin, as part of the exhibition Open Air ’94, ‘Out of Bounds’: Contemporary Art in the Seascape at Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Japan. Developed in 1989, the privately funded Benesse Art Site Naoshima is intended to make connections between art, nature, and the local communities of Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima—three islands in the Seto Inland Sea in Western Japan—as a form of philanthropic capitalism.
1998–1999
The exhibition Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968 is organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Japan Foundation in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This show, which travels to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, examines Kusama’s singular contributions to the international art movements of the 1960s, as well as her pioneering use of media. In 1999, an exhibition organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo—titled In Full Bloom: Yayoi Kusama, Years in Japan and curated by Naoko Seki—surveys Kusama’s career in Japan both before and after her decades abroad.
2002
Kusama publishes Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. The book synthesises texts she has been working on since the early 1970s, as well as even earlier writings.
2004–2005
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, organises Kusama’s most comprehensive retrospective to date, an exhibition titled Yayoi Kusama: Eternity-Modernity. The exhibition was well received by critics.
Meanwhile, Kusama continues to exhibit new work, also opening Kusamatrix in 2004 at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. The installations Hi, Konnichiwa! and Love Forever: Girls! Adolescence is on the Way (both 2004) feature huge, cartoonish, doll-like human figures, some of which are called ‘Yayoi-chan’, lending them a nostalgic, autobiographical dimension. Kusamatrix is seen by more than half a million visitors.
‘What does living a life mean? I lose myself in this thought every time I create artwork.’
— Yayoi Kusama
Force of Life
2009
Kusama starts a new series of paintings titled My Eternal Soul. Extending the simplistically drawn, semi-representational style that characterises her Love Forever drawings, she begins producing colourful acrylic paintings on square canvases. The prevalence of such objects as faces, flowers, and eyes in these drawings and paintings constitutes an apparent departure from her earlier, more austere style of abstraction.
My Heart with Many Worries, 2013, Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
My Heart with Many Worries, 2013, Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
Pound of Repose, 2014. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
Pound of Repose, 2014. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
We Who Are Captivated by the Utmost Beauty of Everything We Know and Shed Tears as We Were Monstrously Touched by the Mystery of the Beauty, 2019. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
We Who Are Captivated by the Utmost Beauty of Everything We Know and Shed Tears as We Were Monstrously Touched by the Mystery of the Beauty, 2019. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
2011–2012
A major retrospective, Yayoi Kusama, at Tate Modern in London, was toured to (the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2011, moves to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and arrives at Tate Modern in 2012, finally travelling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York later that year.
2017
The Yayoi Kusama Museum opens in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo, in a building designed by Japanese architectural firm Kume Sekkei. Kusama’s longtime advocate Akira Tatehata is named director. The first exhibition of the artist’s personal collection, titled Creation Is a Solitary Pursuit, Love Is What Brings You Closer to Art, includes works from My Eternal Soul, drawings from the preceding series, Love Forever, and a new pumpkin installation.
The North American touring exhibition Infinity Mirrors, organised by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, surveys Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, featuring six mirrored environments. Public enthusiasm for the tour is unprecedented. Reviews of the show centre on the mirror rooms as social-media phenomena. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight says of the rooms that ‘looking at the ubiquitous photos of them is as fulfilling as actually being there—which may be a first for art’.
2020
Kusama issues a public message banishing the virus and calling for love and peaceful redemption:
‘Now is the time to overcome, to bring peace
We gathered for love and I hope to fulfil that desire
The time has come to fight and overcome our unhappiness
To COVID-19 that stands in our way
I say Disappear from this earth.’
The statement is accompanied by her own painting When Life Boundlessly Flares Up to the Universe (2014).
2021
A large retrospective of Kusama’s work is held for the first time in Germany, organised by the Gropius Bau in Berlin. In the United States, a major exhibition of Kusama’s outdoor sculpture, KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature, opens at the New York Botanical Garden.
2022
Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is presented at M+, Hong Kong. It is the largest retrospective of the artist in Asia outside Japan.
‘Oh my dearest art.
With the challenge of creating new art,
I work as if dying;
these works are my everything.’
— Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, is on view at M+ from 12 November 2022 to 14 May 2023.
The exhibition is the largest retrospective of renowned artist Yayoi Kusama in Asia outside Japan, featuring more than 200 works from major collections from museums and private collections in Asia, Europe, and the United States, the M+ Collection, as well as from the artist’s own collection.
Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is supported by HSBC, Lead Sponsor, together with HKT as Major Sponsor, Louis Vuitton, Sino Group and The Macallan as Supporting Sponsors and Cathay Pacific Airways as Airline Partner of the exhibition.
Lead Sponsor
Credits
Produced by M+
Text compiled by Alex A. Jones
Producers: Chris Sullivan, Amy Leung
Editors: Amy Leung, William Smith, LW Lam, Yuling Zhong
English to Chinese translations: Ho Kuai Sim, Luisa Ku, Cecilia Kwan, Erica Leung, Amy Li
Japanese to English translations: Ralph McCarthy
Japanese to Chinese translations: Ikeda Lily Chenran
Curatorial research: Isabella Tam, Kary Woo
Artwork-feature texts: Winnie Lai, Ruby Ho, Chris Sullivan
Rights and reproductions: Jacqueline Chan
A very special thank you to: Yayoi Kusama, Doryun Chong, Mika Yoshitake, William Smith, Keri Ryan, Flavio Trevisan, Lucia Lo, Ada Hung, YAYOI KUSAMA Inc., Ota Fine Arts