About the Book
Accompanying the first major American retrospective exhibition of Yayoi Kusama's work, and an exhibition at Tate Modern in London, this volume offers a definitive monograph on Japan's most famous living artist. It features a wealth of works from all periods in Kusama's career, as well as essays by various international curators and critics, discussing Kusama's years in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and the psychoanalytic import of her art. Kusama's originality, innovation and sheer drive to make art have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades, encompassing painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance, installation and even product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York, and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city, becoming close with artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, and influencing many others along the way. It was in these years that Kusama was dubbed "the Polka Dot Princess," for her obsessive use of polka dots in installations and happenings. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition that she has recently achieved. Now in her ninth decade, Kusama's imagination remains fertile and productive, as she continues to devise dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-paints her ongoing series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings.
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She left Japan for New York at the age of 28, following a correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe, and was soon participating in the city's 1960s wave of happenings and avant-garde activities. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and began writing surrealistic novels and poetry. On November 12, 2008, Christie's New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.
Review :
"Kusama's is a wonderful behind-the-music story, the outsider, with destiny in her sights, who moves to the big city to prove herself, then collapses under the strain of striving, only to stage a comeback, bigger than ever."--Carl Swanson "New York Magazine"
"The inescapable theme of infinity floods her work and finds its psychedelic way into the heart of even the most jaded of mainstream critics. Infinite and indispensible."--Patrik Sandberg "V Magazine"
In Japan, she was regarded as "the queen of scandal," the critic Tatehata said, and not as a major artist. Yet she continued to create art, enlisting fellow hospital patients to assist her. The refurbishment of her reputation began with small exhibitions in Tokyo of the exquisite collages she made with magazine clippings that Cornell had given her. But her rediscovery on a larger stage dates from the pioneering 1989 exhibition in New York that was organized by Munroe at the short-lived Center for International Contemporary Arts.--Nobuyoshi Araki "W Magazine"
Looking back, Kusama is an early example of an artist whose contribution is, essentially, a globalization of output. These works need no translation nor do they demand prolonged looking. Essentially they are mass displays of catchy stuff, ranging from airmail labels collaged by the hundred to phalli cast by the thousand, upstaged eventually by quite startling mirror mazes.--William Feaver "ARTnews"
Ms. Kusama was born in the Japanese hinterlands in 1929, and the one big question that's clear in her work is this: How does an artist blossom in the wake of World War II? For Ms. Kusama, one of Japan's best-known artists, the answer was a sharp turn toward sometimes barely decipherable inscapes. She says she makes art "that does battle at the boundary between life and death." In series like Self-Obliteration and Infinity Net it seems that she would like nothing better than to evanesce into eternity.--Dana Jennings "The New York Times"
Kusama, who grew up in rural Japan, first entered the spotlight in the 1960s--a bold splash of psycyhadelia landing in a New York art milieu dominated by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol...She established a reputation for art happenings choreographed with nude performers, soft-form penis sculptures, and dots.
Dots were her thing-beguiling, surreal, mysterious. The dots, she says in her accented English, are "my medicine--my personal medicine. From my childhood, I [saw] the polka dots... [and] people talked about [my art with] the polka dots..."
For her triumphant return to New York, Kusama, a diminutive woman, wore a Technicolor red wig, a black dress spattered with red dots, polka-dot sunglasses, and myriad other dotted accessories from [Louis] Vuitton.--Robin Givhan "Newsweek"
