Yayoi Kusama: remembering the legacy of a thousand polka dots
“Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse. Bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot. That was the way I saw it. I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.”
Mixed media artist and icon Yayoi Kusama died at the age of 97 on August 14th in Tokyo. The Japanese artist inspired a generation of creatives with her fabulous polka dots and out of the box mixed-media art, which included paintings, installations, sculptures, and body art, among many other forms. It’s difficult to describe her art in words, it can be more accurately understood by the feelings her works evoke. I still remember stepping into her Los Angeles installation “With All my Love For the Tulips I Pray Forever” - it completely immersed you into what felt quietly absurd.
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan. Daughter of a traditional Japanese family, Kusama wasn’t met with support when initially deciding to pursue the arts. This didn’t deter her, however; in fact it fueled her creativity and forced her to discover new ways to create with limited resources, despite working full time at a factory. Even as an art student she was constantly pushing boundaries and barriers, staging her first solo exhibition in 1954. Upon her move to the US, Kusama began experimenting with different mediums using body art to protest the Vietnam War, notably painting polka dots on the naked body of protests. In her words, “As we soar through the heavens, we'll paint each other with polka dots, lose our egos in timeless eternity, and finally discover the naked truth: You can't eradicate violence by using more violence”. Her devotion to her art was part of the legacy she’s left. Kusama was extremely prolific, producing tens of thousands of pieces in her lifetime. Her ability to create work that transcended physical reality was largely part to her own struggles with mental health and hallucinations. She coped through her art and sometimes her arts were an extension of the things she feared. Her best known installation the Infinity Mirror Rooms actually represented a form of psychological release.
Putting Yayoi Kusama’s art and legacy into a single genre actually contradicts the creativity and exploration that followed her entire career. Kusama encouraged a new generation of artists to tap into the things that terrified them, or the injustices that kept them up at night, using that anger or fear to create art that transcended worldly emotion. If you haven’t experienced the wonder of Kusama’s work, I’d encourage everyone to go check it out; her Infinity Rooms are a permanent part of the Broad’s collection in Downtown LA. Despite physically passing, Kusama’s legacy will forever remain with us through her art which spoke to many souls.
Image Credit: Sotheby's Ota Fine Arts
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