Yayoi Kusama has so dedicated her life to art that it is fair to say that who she is and what she does are one and the same as her art. Kusama moved to the United States in 1957 and there she produced a series of gigantic works through which visitors experienced the entire exhibition space. Through her radical anti-war actions and performances, she repeatedly expressed powerful messages of peace and love to an American society that was deluged with mass media reporting on the horrors of the Vietnam War. Her oeuvre encompasses painting, sculpture, design, fashion, performance, film, and novels. She has represented Japan at international art exhibitions including the Venice Biennale and the Yokohama Triennale and she has received many prestigious awards, including the Medal with Dark Blue Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan and the Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. Even today she continues to tackle essential themes of human existence, spreading her message of celebrating life to the world.
This exhibition is structured as a conversation between Yayoi Kusama and three other artists. There is Kimiyo Mishima, who like Kusama experienced the war and then the consumer society that was fueled by rapid post-war economic growth. There is Natsuko Tanihara, who sees beauty in the confluence of negative personal memories and the darkness of humanity, a worldview that intersects with Kusama’s worldview of light and darkness, life and death, and self-annihilation. And finally, there is Chiyuki Sakagami, in whose work innumerable shapes resembling ancient cuneiform writing form a universe, a view of nature consistent with that of Kusama, who was born into a family that ran a plant nursery business.
In this exhibition, words of homage for Kusama written by Félix Guattari will be engraved as a message to the next generation of artists: “This woman, who blazed across – but at what cost! – the creative-destructive years of the ‘Beat Generation,” is reborn under our eyes as a great contemporary artist forging the sensibility of a most unpredictable future.”