ART-PRESENTATION: Yayoi Kusama-Life Is the Heart of a Rainbow

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most renowned artists working today. Her creations, with their characteristic dots, nets and pumpkins, have reached beyond the art world to enter popular culture. Since her emergence in Japan in the early 1950s, and her participation in the postwar Art Scenes in New York and Europe in the 1960s, Kusama has carved a singular path as an artist. She has been at the forefront of multimedia art, installation, soft sculpture, performance and public art, influencing generations of artists throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum MACAN Archive

The exhibition “Life Is the Heart of a Rainbow” at The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN) is her first exhibition in Indonesia, featuring 120 works that span seven decades of Yayoi Kusama’s artistic practice. The earliest works in the exhibition were made in Yayoi Kusama’s home studio in Matsumoto, following her study of nihonga (Japanese-style painting) in Kyoto in the late 1940s. Kusama’s relationship with her family was difficult, as they strongly resisted her ambition to be an artist. At this time, Japan was recovering from its defeat in World War II, and the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In these early works, there is a sense of psychological tension, which already features in the repeated dot patterns that would later become Kusama’s trademark. Finding the traditional imagery of nihonga limiting, Kusama was drawn to the art of the Avant Garde. The Dada and Surrealist movements that had strongly influenced Japanese art in the 1920s and 1930s experienced a revival after the war, and a surrealist tendency, an interest in the subconscious, is evident in the five works exhibited here. Despite having held several solo exhibitions in Matsumoto and Tokyo, she was frustrated with the conservative Japanese art establishment. New York had displaced Paris as the center of the international art world by the 1950s, and Kusama felt that a life in America would offer artistic freedom and success. The “Infinity nets” are among the most celebrated of Yayoi Kusama’s many innovative works, causing a sensation when they were originally exhibited in the late 1950s. Profoundly influential, particularly in the United States, these works helped to establish a new direction away from the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, and anticipated later developments in Pop, Minimalism and Concrete Art. They have been a consistent feature of Kusama’s practice for over 50 years. Her early “Infinity nets” were small paintings on paper, and they drew on visual references such as the waves of the Pacific Ocean that the artist observed from the plane en route from Japan to the United States in 1957. Using a limited palette, often as simple as one shade of white on another, one color is painted in tight repetitive loops to form undulating nets over a monochromatic ground. After her arrival in New York in 1958, the works grew in scale, often covering entire walls and anticipating her later installations. Lacking a discernible center and disregarding conventions of composition, these works proposed painting not as the production of autonomous artworks, but as objects within the world – paintings as surface-driven, three-dimensional forms. In this exhibition, the selection of net paintings from the 1950s to the present day demonstrates the development of Kusama’s approach over decades, from early works on paper, to white and colored monochromes, to multi-panel paintings introducing rich colors and organic imagery. The human body was at the forefront of Yayoi Kusama’s art in the 1960s. She was frequently photographed posing with her artworks to signify a unity of art and artist. As an extension of her interest, she founded several commercial and professional ventures, including Kusama Fashion Company, which produced costumes, many with cut-outs scandalously exposing parts of the body. These were worn in her performances and fashion shows, and were even sold at major department stores in New York. By the late 1960s, Kusama had expanded her practice to encompass exuberant, psychedelic happenings. Involving the artist and other participants, these happenings were part protest and part celebration, as Kusama was deeply attuned to the political and social issues of the era, such as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Her public performances took place in significant locations in New York, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park and Wall Street, while her nightclub happenings featured lighting, colorful projections, music and poetry – both featured nude, dancing bodies painted with her iconic dots. Such celebration of the human form asserted the liberating power of love and vitality in the face of violence and corrupt social values. Documentation of a selection of these public performances, known variously as “Body Festivals”, “Naked Happenings” and “Anatomic Explosions”, is displayed here. When Yayoi Kusama returned to Japan in the mid-1970s, she found responses to her work limited. They constituted either salacious accounts of her work’s psychological subject matter and her personal eccentricities, or simple indifference, as critics struggled to assimilate her unconventional art into the cultural landscape of her home country. Meanwhile, in the highly competitive environment of the New York art world, Kusama’s earlier innovations were soon overlooked, so she set about working toward artistic acceptance in Japan. Kusama’s works underwent several shifts during this period, most notably in terms of scale, which expanded to encompass the viewer. Her themes became richer and more complex as she experimented widely; she composed poetry and prose, explored the soft sculpture and painterly aspects of her practice, and deepened her psychological and sexual preoccupations. It was during this time that pumpkins emerged as a major motif in her work. For Kusama, the pumpkin represents comfort and security, her family once owned a nursery and grew fields of pumpkins and flowers, and pumpkins formed a major part of her diet as a child. The artist has said that their “generous unpretentiousness” and “solid spiritual balance” appeal to her. Its bulbous form suggests fertility, and each of Kusama’s pumpkins has a highly individual physical presence. The bright color and speckled skin of the pumpkin also inspired Kusama’s distinctive yellow-and-black color scheme, which extended to paintings such as “Sex obsession” (1992) and installations including “Dots obsession” (2017). What would become the artist’s “My Eternal Soul” series began as a personal challenge: to make a series of 100 canvases over an 18-month period in 2009–10. At the culmination of this task, Kusama decided to produce a second set of 100 works. She has continued to paint in this way, with these works now numbering into the high hundreds. Yayoi Kusama pioneered her mirror installation technique in the mid-1960s, using mirrored walls and ceilings to create the illusion of infinite reflection. The technique re-emerged in the 1990s, just as installation gained widespread acceptance as an art form.  In “Soul under the moon” (2002) repetition is achieved through the use of light, water and mirrors in a confined space, while the undulating fields of Kusama’s net paintings are echoed in the floating fluorescent Ping-Pong balls.  “THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS” (2015) is an updated version of the centerpiece of Yayoi Kusama’s presentation in the Japanese Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, an event which re-introduced her to the world as a contemporary artist at the same time her historical significance was being established. On approach, the work resembles a classic minimalist cube, its mirrored surfaces reflecting the walls, floor and ceiling of the surrounding gallery space, all of which are painted yellow with black polka dots. A small window in one side of the cube allows viewers to glimpse its interior, containing an array of pumpkin sculptures in the same yellow-and-black color scheme. The pumpkins are internally illuminated and surrounded by mirrors, creating the impression of a vast field extending in all directions. Having already explored the potential of mirrors to help her enact her core concepts of repetition, accumulation and infinity, in 1966, the artist presented “Kusama’s Peep Show”. A hexagonal structure that the viewer peered into, the work was filled with multicolored flashing lights and accompanied by psychedelic rock music. It was subsequently remade in the 1990s, and in 2008 it was displayed surrounded by (and reflecting) the entire series of the “Love Forever” canvases. In this most recent version, with its three circular viewing holes at varying heights, “I WANT TO LOVE ON THE FESTIVAL NIGHT” (2017) incorporates the faces of viewers into its immersive visual field. “Dots Obsession” exemplifies Kusama’s spatial experimentation and her endless fascination with positioning viewers in relation to the art object. First created in 1996, this on-going series of installations features suspended biomorphic or spherical inflatables covered in polka-dots in different color combinations.

Info: The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), AKR Tower Level MM, Jalan Panjang No. 5 Kebon Jeruk, Jakarta, Duration: 12/5-9/9/18, Days & hours: Tue-sun 10:00-20:00, www.museummacan.org