Japanese painter, performance, and installation artist (born 1929)
is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and she is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, , pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts for a year in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. She was inspired by American Abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly coloured polka dots. She experienced a period in the 1970s during which her work was largely forgotten, but a revival of interest in the 1980s brought her art back into public view. Kusama has continued to create art in various museums around the world, from the 1950s through the 2020s.
Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art", she told an interviewer in 2012. "I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live."
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Action Painting was all the rage then, and everybody was adopting this style and selling the stuff at outrageous prices. My paintings were the polar opposite in terms of intention, but I believed that producing the unique art that came from within myself was the most important thing I could do to build my life as an artist.
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Narcissus Garden was an environmental piece consisting of fifteen hundred plastic mirror balls covering a section of green lawn. The chairman himself had helped me install the reflective spheres, so it was hardly a ‘guerrilla’ operation. I stood among the mirror balls in a formal gold kimono with silver obi and handed out copies of the statement Sir Herbert Read had provided for my exhibition two years earlier. As a comment on commercialism in the art world, I was selling the mirror balls for 1,200 lira (about $2) each, an audience-participation performance that shocked the authorities. They made me stop, telling me it was inappropriate to sell my artworks as if they were ‘hot dogs or ice cream cones’. But the installation remained.
In O’Keeffe’s thoughtful reply, dated 18 August, she advised me in the gentlest tones, showing consideration for my youthful artistic ambitions: You seem to be having a hard time to get here. If you do get here I hope it will seem to be worth your trouble. When you get to New York take your pictures under your arm and show them to anyone you think may be interested. You will just have to find your way as best you can. It seems to me very odd that you are so ambitious to show your paintings here, but I wish the best for you.
"I work as much as fifty to sixty hours at a stretch," Kusama wrote in a 1961 article of her entrancing, utterly consuming creative process. "I gradually feel myself under the spell of the accumulation and repetition in my nets which expand beyond myself, and over the limited space of canvas, covering the floor, desks and everywhere."
Sometimes, when I was tired of working, I would go to the Museum of Modern Art. Standing before the great pageant of art history, I would gaze on the works that have survived beyond their times, analy-sing and evaluating them as if trying to solve mathematical puzzles, attempting to assess them in the context of the societies and times that had engendered them; but then I would return to myself and, in trying to consider the next starting point for my work, always find myself faced with the difficulty of reading my own future.
What I think about first and foremost is that I want to create good art. That is my sole desire. It would be futile and meaningless to focus on the shrinking time-frame before me, or to think of my limitations. I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death. There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart is bursting with the aspiration to make art that will last forever. I feel how truly wonderful life is, and I tremble with undying fascination for the world of art, the only place that gives me hope and makes life worthwhile. And no matter how I may suffer for my art, I will have no regrets. This is the way I have lived my life, and it is the way I shall go on living.
"Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears"
When the time comes around for people to encounter the end of their life
having put on years, death seems to be quietly approaching
It was not supposed to be my style to be frightened of that, but I am
In the shadows of my loved ones footprints, distress revisits me at the dead of night refreshing my memories
Being in love with and longing for you, I have locked myself up in this “castle of shed tears”
Now may be the time for me to wander off into the place, the guidepost to the other world points to
And the sky is waiting for me, attended by numerous clouds
Overwhelmed by your tenderness that has always encouraged me
I have been searching for “love” in earnest taking my wish for happiness along
Let me call out to and ask the birds flying about in the sky
I want to convey to them my feelings
Over many long years, with art as a weapon
I have treaded the path in search of love
During the days I have lived through keeping “despair”, “emptiness” and “loneliness” all to myself along the way
there were times when the fireworks of life “splendidly” adorned the sky
Dancing in the night sky in a myriad of colors, the fireworks sprinkled dust all over my body
I will never forget that exhilarating moment
Now I think is the time to dedicate my heart to you, my dearest
Was the beauty of the end of one’s life nothing more than illusion?
Would you give me an answer to this?
Devoting all my heart to you, I have lived through to this day
Hoping to leave beautiful footprints at the end of my life
I spend each day praying that my wish will be fulfilled
This is my message of love to you
All of my works are steps on my journey, a struggle for truth that I have waged with pen, canvas, and materials. Overhead is a distant, radiant star, and the more I stretch to reach it, the further it recedes. But by the power of my spirit and my single-hearted pursuit of the path, I have clawed my way through the labyrinthine confusion of the world of people in an unstinting effort to approach even one step closer to the realm of the soul.
The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.
My revolution of the Self, which has been such an essential part of my life so far, is all about discovering death. My destiny is to make art for my own requiem: art which gives meaning to death, tracing the beauty of colours and space in the silence of death’s footsteps and the ‘nothingness’ it promises.