Arised from a hallucination
I approach the work of Yayoi Kusama for the first time as a dark and downcast Parsifal wrapped by the force of the music of Wagner and knowing that the weapons to fight in life arise from the interior color. Yayoi Kusama found this as a child when she suffered from a hallucination around the family table. The red flowers in the tablecloth multiplied on the floor, walls and roof of the house, and even on herself. The color washed over her and as Parsifal enlightened by the power of the inner light, Yayoi Kusama surrendered her entire body and soul to an artistic creation that she has evolved into a radical expression.
She was born in Japan in 1928 and from an early age she painted watercolors and oil paintings of a surprising sensitivity. In 1957 she moved to America where she exhibited her sculptures based on mirrors and electric lights. In a few years her creativity took her to express herself as a writer, singer and a major artist in the world of happenings. As early as 1968 she starred and produced the film Kusama's Self-Obliteration widely recognized in various festivals. Because of that, she exposed her works in various European countries.
In the mid seventies, she decided to return to Japan where she continues to develop her writer facet publishing novels like The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street (1983) achieving the Tenth Literary Award for New Writers of the journal Yasei Yiday. All without leaving her plastic side which in the nineties led her to create her first outdoor sculptures by accepting projects from around the world, opening her art to people from Tokyo to Lisbon.
Recently the documentary Yayoi Kusama, I adore myself by Takako Matsumoto has been released. It shows us her fluffy forms, bright colors in surreal atmospheres, which are proof of her vocation to break the mold set. We can also see it in her performances, where from an apparent docility is perceived an underlying violence from which one must become emancipated. All the blast of her art is the search for liberation through the mind. The imagination is a means of personal development to transform reality by building a refusal to let society shape us. Her art is always on the move, everything looks for flowing even through a prior violence, not always physical but psychic. The clash of established schemes under the fury of her art pieces always full of curves and color is inevitable. As always should have been.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris devotes a comprehensive retrospective of one hundred and fifty works produced between 1940 and 2010 through which we can approach the creative evolution of an artist who one day decided to change her own world.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Exhibition in Esbós section
Photo courtesy of Centre Pompidou:
Yayoi Kusama à l’intérieur de l’installation Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field, « Floor Show », Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965.
Ph. Courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio, Tokyo