Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusamais a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth22 March 1929
CountryJapan
In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.
I have been using polka dots since I was a very young child. Only after that, it seems, have they been used throughout the rest of the art world.
Certainly, I devote my energy to both telling my personal life story and seeking self- obliteration. However, I will not destroy myself through art.
More and more I think about the role of the arts, and as an artist, I think that it’s important that I share the love and peace,
I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.
If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,
My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though.
With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing philosophy of the universe through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call stereotypical repetition.
Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.
I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.
Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama's hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.
My mother was against me being an artist. She just wanted me to marry a rich man.
I would like to try harder to establish my thought and philosophy strongly and to go back to the universe with my love.
I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw.