Yayoi Kusama, I WANT TO SEE A HEART WITH MY OWN EYES, 2018, mirrored box and LED lights, H220 x 144.3 x 125 cm
© YAYOI KUSAMA, Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore / Shanghai
In 2009, Kusama began her ‘My Eternal Soul’ painting series that characterizes her work of the 21st century. She had initially planned to create around 100 paintings but have since went on to paint over 550 paintings, with the number still increasing today. When hung together in sequence, these paintings offer viewers a snippet into Kusama’s vibrant and repetitive world of form, color and movement. Biomorphic shapes, frontal faces that Kusama refers to as ‘Manga’, eyelets, faces in profile, flowers, phallic shapes, pumpkins, nets and dots are sprawled across each canvas. Occasionally serious yet clownish and humorous at times, these paintings lie between the surreal and the figurative. They are an amalgamation of the artist’s signature motifs, her boundless explorations of new motifs, and a blossoming narrative of her life’s work.
Accompanying the paintings are soft sculptures of varying height and dimensions. They echo and reflect the shapes, lines and colors in her paintings, bringing them to life in three-dimensional forms.
Obsessed with the notion of infinite space, Kusama re-creates that to fascinating perfection in her Infinity Mirror Rooms. In this exhibition, viewers experience an obliterative encounter as they peer into the small windows of the mirrored hexagon chamber “I WANT TO SEE A HEART WITH MY OWN EYES”. Small light bulbs flicker on and off as they change in color and are multiplied through reflection, moments of erasure are experienced as space and light expands infinitely in all directions.
Yayoi Kusama, WOMEN CALLING SPRING, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 145.5 x 145.5 cm
© YAYOI KUSAMA, Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore / Shanghai
About the Artist
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture in 1929. After studying painting in the modern Japanese Nihonga style in Kyoto, she moved to New York in the late 1950s. Kusama established her career as an avant-garde artist through stimulating happenings and exhibitions until the mid-1960s. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. From 1980 onwards she became widely known through international solo exhibitions, and the opportunity matured for re-evaluation at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. Thereafter she has held solo exhibitions throughout the world at venues such as New York MoMA, Tate Modern and Pompidou Centre. In 2016 she was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people. In the same year she was also bestowed the prestigious “Order of Culture” award in Japan.
For more information: www.otafinearts.com/sh