Yayoi Kusama

by Yayoi Kusama, Frances Morris (Contribution by)

Overview

A definitive monograph on Japan’s most famous living artist, Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama’s originality, innovation, and powerful desire to communicate have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades. During this time, Kusama has explored painting, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance and installation, and product design.

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Kusama lived in New York and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city. Returning to Japan in her 40s, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition she has recently achieved. In her ninth decade, her imagination remains richly creative and she continues to extend the range of her practice.

Having accompanied the first major retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work to be staged in the UK, this lavishly illustrated book features an introductory essay by Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, as well as four other substantial essays by leading international critics. Topics covered include Kusama’s time in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works, and an exploration of her art from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781854379399
Publisher:	Tate Publishing
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	1,139,333
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 10.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Frances Morris is director of Tate Modern. Jo Applin is head of the History of Art Department at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Juliet Mitchell is professor emerita of psychoanalysis and gender studies at the University of Cambridge. Mignon Nixon is professor of modern and contemporary art at University College London.

Editorial Reviews

Ms. Kusama was born in the Japanese hinterlands in 1929, and the one big question that’s clear in her work is this: How does an artist blossom in the wake of World War II? For Ms. Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known artists, the answer was a sharp turn toward sometimes barely decipherable inscapes. She says she makes art “that does battle at the boundary between life and death.” In series like Self-Obliteration and Infinity Net it seems that she would like nothing better than to evanesce into eternity.

The New York Times - Dana Jennings

Looking back, Kusama is an early example of an artist whose contribution is, essentially, a globalization of output. These works need no translation nor do they demand prolonged looking. Essentially they are mass displays of catchy stuff, ranging from airmail labels collaged by the hundred to phalli cast by the thousand, upstaged eventually by quite startling mirror mazes.

ARTnews - William Feaver

In Japan, she was regarded as "the queen of scandal," the critic Tatehata said, and not as a major artist. Yet she continued to create art, enlisting fellow hospital patients to assist her. The refurbishment of her reputation began with small exhibitions in Tokyo of the exquisite collages she made with magazine clippings that Cornell had given her. But her rediscovery on a larger stage dates from the pioneering 1989 exhibition in New York that was organized by Munroe at the short-lived Center for International Contemporary Arts.

W Magazine - Nobuyoshi Araki

"The inescapable theme of infinity floods her work and finds its psychedelic way into the heart of even the most jaded of mainstream critics. Infinite and indispensible."

V Magazine - Patrik Sandberg

"Kusama's is a wonderful behind-the-music story, the outsider, with destiny in her sights, who moves to the big city to prove herself, then collapses under the strain of striving, only to stage a comeback, bigger than ever."

New York Magazine - Carl Swanson

Kusama, who grew up in rural Japan, first entered the spotlight in the 1960s--a bold splash of psycyhadelia landing in a New York art milieu dominated by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol…She established a reputation for art happenings choreographed with nude performers, soft-form penis sculptures, and dots.
Dots were her thing-beguiling, surreal, mysterious. The dots, she says in her accented English, are "my medicine--my personal medicine. From my childhood, I [saw] the polka dots… [and] people talked about [my art with] the polka dots…"
For her triumphant return to New York, Kusama, a diminutive woman, wore a Technicolor red wig, a black dress spattered with red dots, polka-dot sunglasses, and myriad other dotted accessories from [Louis] Vuitton.

Newsweek - Robin Givhan

"The inescapable theme of infinity floods her work and finds its psychedelic way into the heart of even the most jaded of mainstream critics. Infinite and indispensible."
— Patrik Sandberg

V Magazine

"Kusama's is a wonderful behind-the-music story, the outsider, with destiny in her sights, who moves to the big city to prove herself, then collapses under the strain of striving, only to stage a comeback, bigger than ever."
— Carl Swanson

New York Magazine

Ms. Kusama was born in the Japanese hinterlands in 1929, and the one big question that's clear in her work is this: How does an artist blossom in the wake of World War II? For Ms. Kusama, one of Japan's best-known artists, the answer was a sharp turn toward sometimes barely decipherable inscapes. She says she makes art "that does battle at the boundary between life and death." In series like Self-Obliteration and Infinity Net it seems that she would like nothing better than to evanesce into eternity.
— Dana Jennings

The New York Times

Looking back, Kusama is an early example of an artist whose contribution is, essentially, a globalization of output. These works need no translation nor do they demand prolonged looking. Essentially they are mass displays of catchy stuff, ranging from airmail labels collaged by the hundred to phalli cast by the thousand, upstaged eventually by quite startling mirror mazes.
— William Feaver

ARTnews

In Japan, she was regarded as "the queen of scandal," the critic Tatehata said, and not as a major artist. Yet she continued to create art, enlisting fellow hospital patients to assist her. The refurbishment of her reputation began with small exhibitions in Tokyo of the exquisite collages she made with magazine clippings that Cornell had given her. But her rediscovery on a larger stage dates from the pioneering 1989 exhibition in New York that was organized by Munroe at the short-lived Center for International Contemporary Arts.
— Nobuyoshi Araki

W Magazine