Yayoi Kusama, Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, 2010. © YAYOI KUSAMA
This exhibition presents recent and new works by Yayoi Kusama created over the past ten years with the theme of her diverse visions, consisting of twenty-two works that are shown for the first time in Japan or anywhere in the world. From her latest canvas series, My Eternal Soul, in which she pours the visions overflowing from her inner world, the exhibition showcases the newest of her accomplished one-meter-square paintings.
The exhibition also includes installations that invite visitors to immerse themselves in to experience the works. The presented works include her latest participatory project, FLOWER OBSESSION, in which her hallucinatory vision is realized through an entire room’s surface covered by flowers, as well as an immersive installation created for this exhibition, Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe. This exhibition invites you thus to see and experience the present state of Kusama’s visions.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe, 2020. © YAYOI KUSAMA
Yayoi Kusama began her creative career as an artist by depicting the hallucinations she experienced in her childhood, as a means to overcome her fears. Since then, Kusama has continued to produce works using these visions of her hallucinations and inner world. On this occasion, Yayoi Kusama Museum presents recent and new works created by Yayoi Kusama over the past ten years with the theme of her diverse visions, consisting of twenty-two works that are shown for the first time in Japan or anywhere in the world. From her latest canvas series, My Eternal Soul, in which she pours the visions overflowing from her inner world, the exhibition showcases the newest of her accomplished one-meter-square paintings. A video installation work, Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, in which Kusama sings a poem about her hallucinatory experiences with the psychedelic images of her works in the background, reflecting eternally in opposing mirrors; her latest participatory project, FLOWER OBSESSION, in which her hallucinatory vision is realized through an entire room’s surface covered by flowers; and an immersive installation created for this exhibition, Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe, are all on view for the very first time in Japan or anywhere in the world. Through her method of “self-obliteration“, which eliminates the boundaries between the self and others and all things through repetition and proliferation, Kusama transforms unsettling hallucinations that bring fear into mystical visions of ecstasy, as though immersing in the stardust of the infinite universe.
Yayoi Kusama, FLOWERS THAT SPEAK ALL ABOUT MY HEART GIVEN TO THE SKY, 2018. © YAYOI KUSAMA
This exhibition introduces the present state of Kusama’s visions, which depict her longing for the universe and the unknown. Yayoi Kusama‘s desire to create artworks remains undiminished to this day, and she continues to devote most of her time to her works even now.
This exhibition presents twenty-two works created by Yayoi Kusama since 2010 that are shown for the first time in Japan or anywhere in the world. Kusama’s method of repetition and accumulation of obsessive visions has been a fundamental part of her practice for more than half a century. To realize her visions of obsession, Kusama keeps challenging herself with new materials and technologies, and this exhibition introduces the latest state of her diverse practice. SOULS OF WOMEN THAT CONTINUE FOREVER, which is created by casting a series of profiles with aluminum, is a relief work created for this exhibition and has never been shown in Japan. Drawn with vividly contrasting colors, these profiles, combined with floating and somewhat humorous shapes, stimulate our imagination, as though they are the souls of women who are omnipresent, or the souls of women who travel through time and space. The bronze cast outdoor sculpture, FLOWERS THAT SPEAK ALL ABOUT MY HEART GIVEN TO THE SKY, which is exhibited in the rooftop gallery on the fifth floor, is also created for this exhibition. Metal materials, such as aluminum and bronze, have become Kusama‘s preferred materials in recent years, due to the artist’s earnest desire to preserve her works forever by using more durable materials. In Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, which is shown in the gallery on the second floor, Kusama sings a poem about her hallucinatory experiences with the psychedelic images of her works in the background, reflecting eternally in opposing mirrors as a video installation work. Kusama’s artistic method of placing multiple mirrors facing one another has been used repeatedly since the artist’s first mirror room work in 1965, and with this work she evolves this technique in the new realm of video installation.
Image courtesy of © YAYOI KUSAMA
Experience Kusama’s vision through walk-in immersive installations and a participatory project.
