Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生, Kusama Yayoi, born 22 March 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based on 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. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.
Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. Kusama was inspired, however, by American Abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world.
Kusama has been open about her mental health. She says that art has become her way to express her mental disease.
This creator provides examples of the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Since both of her parents where forced into a Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage, her father would womanize while her mother would take out her aggression on Yayoi.
- Cool Old Lady: She's in her nineties but she still creates mind-bending, avant-garde art in brightly-colored wigs.
- Hall of Mirrors: Her Mirror/Infinity rooms are meant to invoke this, endlessly reflecting suspended lights.
- Mad Artist: Kusama is open about her mental health. Her polka dot motif is based off of visual hallucinations she suffered from as a child. Since 1973, she lives out of a mental hospital in Tokyo and continues to create art in a nearby studio.
- Mind Screw: The polka dot patterns in her works, especially those involving rooms, are noted to obliterate the silhouette of anything covered in them, creating the illusion of infinite space and crushing flatness at the same time.
- Motifs:
- Polka dots polka dots polka dots. Every work of art — from her paintings to her sculptures — are covered in polka dots.
- Pumpkins are arguably the most famous example of representational work she has made, notably the yellow and black examples from the 80's.
- One-Track-Minded Artist: While she does do other types of artwork, most of her art is based around polka dots and pumpkins... but mostly polka-dots.
