The Cultured WIFE: Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生 Kusama Yayoi^?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist artmovements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano into an upper middle-class family of seedling merchants, Kusama started creating art at an early age, going on to study Nihonga painting in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by theabstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary mediums, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal during the early 1960s, where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention after she 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 that in New York.  She continues 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.

Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and Tate Modern, whilst in 2008 Christies New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist. – Wikipeda

You can currently visit the Yayoi Kusama Exhibit “Fireflies on the Water” at The Whitney Museum in New York until September 30th, 2012. Kusama’s “Fireflies on the Water” (2002)—with its carefully constructed environment of lights, mirrors, and water—is one of the outstanding examples of this kind of installation, which creates a space in which individual viewers are invited to transcend their sense of self. Timed tickets are required for entry into “Fireflies on the Water.” Per the artist’s wishes, visitors must enter the installation one at a time, unless assistance or a guardian is required. There is a one-minute time limit inside the installation. Click HERE for more visitor information.

What do you think of Yayoi Kusama’s art work?