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Yayoi KUSAMA
Japan b.1929
 Yayoi Kusama Narcissus garden (detail) 1966/2002 Site-specific work Watermall: 1200 x 2400 x 30cm Mirror balls: approx. 2000, 18cm diameter each Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2002 Queensland Art Gallery Collection: The artist Photograph: Matthew Kassay |
Yayoi Kusama has been working as a painter, sculptor and environmental artist for the last fifty years. Born in Matsumoto, Kusama moved from Japan to the USA in 1957, where for fifteen years she participated in the politically charged artistic environment of New York. She returned to Tokyo in the early 1970s where she continues to live and work. Kusama has been extrememly influential, and she is undoubtedly one of the most significant post war artists to emerge from Asia.
More information about the artist
 Yayoi Kusama Kusama with ‘Love Forever’ buttons, which she distributed at the opening of Kusama's peep show: endless love show, a mirror-lined environmental installation at Castellane Gallery New York, 1966 Gelatin silver photograph Collection: The artist Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo Photograph: Hal Reiff |
 Yayoi Kusama Infinity nets 2000 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas 160 x 130cm The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art Purchased 2001 with funds from The Myer Foundation A project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899–1999 Gift through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Photograph: Ray Fulton |
Infinity nets 2000 belongs to a series of 'Infinity net' works that has preoccupied Kusama throughout her entire career. These paintings comprise thousands of tiny, intersecting dots and are the artists expression of her perceptual encounter with the physical world. For Kusama, the Infinity net works are an attempt to represent the visual and aural hallucinations that she has experienced since childhood as symptoms of the psychiatric condition rijinsho (depersonalisation syndrome):
I was often troubled by a thin silk-like greyish-coloured veil that came to envelop me. . . The only way to free myself from them was to control myself - by visually reproducing on paper with pencils or paints, or by drawing from memory these nondescript occurrences. . . (1)
 Yayoi Kusama Narcissus garden (and detail) 1966/2002 Site-specific work Watermall: 1200 x 2400 x 30cm Mirror balls: approx. 2000, 18cm diameter each Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2002 Queensland Art Gallery Collection: The artist Photography: Matthew Kassay |
Narcissus garden 2002 and Soul under the moon 2002 are environmental and architectural extensions of the ‘Infinity net’ paintings. In this incarnation of Narcissus garden, hundreds of reflective balls have been set afloat in the Gallery Watermall. Each of these mirror balls represents the sun and is a three-dimensional version of the polka dot that is found throughout Kusama’s work.
 Yayoi Kusama Soul under the moon 2002 Site-specific work Dimensions variable Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2002 Queensland Art Gallery Collection: The artist Photograph: Matthew Kassay |
Quicktime VR of Soul under the moon
(Requires QuickTime 6 plugin)
Soul under the moon 2002 is a new work in Kusama’s series of ‘Mirror/Infinity rooms’. This work has been conceived as the complement to Narcissus garden 2002 and features suspended glow-in-the-dark balls representing the moon. The mirrored walls of the closed room create a never-ending series of reflections, producing the allusion of infinite space.
1. Quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata & U. Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, Phaidon, London, 2000, pp.118–19.
This artist is featured in the Education Resource Kit.
List of works in APT 2002
Artists and Works
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