A Dream I Dream is currently on view at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung and includes 120 paintings, sculptures and installations by the legendary Japanese artist
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Posted by David Frazier / Contributing Reporter
Yayoi Kusama is possibly the most popular artist in the world. She is an 86-year-old woman who volunteers in a mental hospital in Japan and is known for her polka dot painting. Last year her exhibitions drew more visitors than any other living artist. More than two million visited her various traveling exhibitions in Latin America and Asia. Her works sold for over $ 44 million last year, most of them by living artists. And it has a strong and almost entirely user-generated online presence with over 173,000 images tagged with the hashtag #YayoiKusama on Instagram (more than #JeffKoons with 138,000 tags, but far behind #AndyWarhol with 448,000).
In many ways, Kusama’s success is unprecedented, and not just because she is an artist.
GLOBAL REACH OF ART
Photo courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung
The art newspaper recently dubbed her “the poster child for the globalization of contemporary art,” an epithet that highlights the point that perhaps for the first time in history a living visual artist can enjoy fame in cities that stretch as far as London. Mexico City and Seoul and Mount Exhibitions touring the world like a rock band.
Taiwan was not excluded from this road show. Kusama’s traveling exhibition for Asia, A Dream I Dreamed, is now on view at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung and runs through August 30th.
The exhibition, which includes around 120 paintings, sculptures and installations, was organized by the curators of the Daegu Art Museum in Korea, where it was first shown in 2013. She has since traveled to Seoul, Shanghai, and the Kaohsiung Fine Art Museum earlier this year, which drew over 170,000 visitors from February to May. The Taipei Museum of Fine Arts had also made an offer to host the exhibition, and when the offer failed, it caused some consternation in the local media. After Taiwan, the exhibition continues to New Delhi.
Photo courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung
What is the source of Kusama’s massive and now global pull?
For half a century, Kusama has been painting polka dots and other simple patterns – especially overlapping loops, which she calls “infinity nets” – on canvases, naked human bodies, interiors, sculptures of common natural objects such as melons and flowers, and giant inflatable blobs, which themselves are called Polka dots work when placed in a landscape.
Japanese-born Kusama claims to have experienced hallucinations of points as a child and began to sketch them in from the beginning. Frustrated by her philandering father and Japan’s restrictive education system, she moved to New York in the late 1950s, where she fell into the burgeoning pop art movement and became a social radical. While exhibiting with Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg in the 1960s and early 1970s, she staged protests and events, including a march on Wall Street (with nude dancers covered in polka dots) intended as a protest against the capitalists who funded the military aggression in Vietnam.
Photo courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung
Kusama was also a fierce advocate for free love and other liberal forms of sexuality. That included the publication of a racy magazine called Kusama’s Orgy, which hosted a gay wedding and wrote an open letter to then-President Richard Nixon promising to have sex with him if he ended the Veitnam War. Despite her outward sexual exuberance, she was averse to physical sex, and her only known relationship is a platonic affair with surrealist sculptor Joseph Cornell, who was 26 years her senior.
In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and opened an art gallery that failed as did her other artistic endeavors up to that time. In 1977 she checked into a mental hospital and has lived there ever since, although she continues to commute to her studio, where she paints angrily and, even at the age of 86, produces several hundred paintings a year.
Kusama’s life makes for a fascinating story. It is not fully told in the current exhibition A Dream I Dreamed, which instead focuses on the artist’s recent fame as a global pop phenomenon and presents her as a kind of Hello Kitty of contemporary art. Aside from a bed covered in stuffed fabric penises, Repetitive Vision – Phallus Boat (2000), which is easy to miss, the exhibit is a G-rated presentation of the artist’s recent work with almost everyone over the past 10 years produced works. since Kusama reached the age of 75.
A dream I’ve dreamed was no doubt conceived with a big box office in mind, and it makes the most of showing Kusama’s imaginatively patterned world to an audience engaging in the arts from Picasso to Andy Warhol.
One encounters works that can easily be identified as “art” – not least because around half of the exhibition consists of paintings that combine various modernist styles from the abstraction of the early 20th century to minimalism and pop art. Kusama paints in a naive, almost childlike hand and presents colorfully patterned fields or doodles of suns, faces, eyes, spikes, circles and wavy lines. As a group, they are an impressive pastiche of painters like Joan Miro, Henri Matisse, the post-cubist Picasso and even Jean Michel-Basquiat – but without ever reaching the refinement, nuance and painterly brilliance of these artists.
However, Kusama’s larger project is not really about style per se, but about transforming the world into a world of polka dots, that is, a world of patterns and beauty as well as love and happiness. It has a femininity and a naivete about it – it’s almost girly, albeit on a grand scale. Her ability to inject a feminine sensibility into the world of serious, male-dominated art – movements such as abstraction, minimalism, and pop art – will perhaps be remembered as her greatest historical achievement.
Kusama undoubtedly counts as a modernist, painting, as Kandinsky would have put it, out of “inner necessity” or, as she put it, out of “obsession”. But unlike her male colleagues, her work is playful and confidently decorative – never serious, strict or intellectual. Perhaps one could place them on the opposite pole of the color field painter Mark Rothko, who in his pursuit of abstract beauty claimed a feeling of “tragedy, ecstasy and doom”.
“INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM”
One of the most popular exhibits in the current exhibit is Infinity Mirrored Room – Brilliance of Souls (2014) – you have to queue to enter and the wait can be up to two hours. This installation is a rectangular chamber the size of a small bedroom with mirrors covering the interior walls, floor and ceiling. More than a thousand colored balls of light dangle at different heights, and their reflections seem to stretch to infinity, giving the impression of standing in the middle of a pretty cosmos.
This is how Kusama imagines death, too, and related feelings bubble in the series of paintings My Eternal Soul (which she began at the age of 80), a poem entitled “I want to live forever, but …” and numerous others Works on.
In her autobiography, Kusama writes, “By covering my entire body with polka dots and then covering the background with polka dots, I find self-extinction.” This notion of death is peaceful, a process of simply stepping into the background of a dotty universe .
But it’s not there yet. Kusama also recently stated, “I want to paint 1,000 or 2,000 paintings. I would like to continue painting even after my death. “At the moment it just dissolves into the creative act.
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