CUT THE RIBBON, YAYOI KUSAMA

Posted on January 28, 2013 by admin

From rural Japan to technological NYC. She can paint, creates collage, makes sculpures, performances, environmental installations, book illustrations. She is the queen of dots, pois, or better she has cut the ribbon as first Japanese female psychedelic performer. Even though forgotten after leaving the early NYC’s pop scene in the 70’s, Yayoi Kusama is now widely acknowledged. Maybe one of Japan’s most important living artist and avant garde voice.Yayoi Kusama started creating art at an early age and became interested in the European and American avant garde.It was 1957 when she moved to the US, settling in NYC where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited with the likes of Andy Warhol and embracing the rise of the early hippie movement of the late 60s.She, for instance, organised a series of Body Festivals in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. In 1973, Kusama moved back to her native Japan, where she found the art scene far more conservative than New York. There she became an art dealer and continued to produce artworks in a variety of mediums, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several novels, a poetry collection and an autobiography. I personally admire and adore her Alice in Wonderland’s illustrations. Kusama’s conceptual art shows feminism, minimalism, surrealism and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content.Her obsessiveness in repeating dot patterns seem to assert the desire to escape and the viewer of her obsessive vision of endless dots gets inprisoned in a maniac net, where the only thing to do is to be submerged. Nowadays Yayoi Kusama lives and works in Tokyo.