On August 14th the world said goodbye to Yayoi Kusama, the artist passed away at the age of 97. However, her legacy as one of the most distinctive artists of our time will live on.
Kusama was born in 1929 to a Japanese family, and is considered to be have had a conventional upbringing for the time period. From a young age, she expressed desire in becoming a professional artist and even found time to continue drawing when she went to work as a child in a parachute factory after the outbreak of the Second World War, Kusama.
Early Success
Kusama began publicly exhibiting her work in group exhibitions in her teens and in 1948, after World War Two ended, she was able to go to Kyoto to study painting. She continued her studies in Kamakura City but soon grew tired of conventional style, moving on to her first major solo exhibition in Japan at 23 years old. She went on to achieve international avant-garde recognition in New York at age 30. However, her major global fame and record-breaking market success was arrived much later in her 80s and 90s.
Kusama’s work centres around infinite polka dots and nets, often at a huge scale and with an undeniable psychedelic, encompassing effect. She was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive neurosis at age 48 voluntarily checked herself into the Seiwa Mental Hospital, where she lived until her death.
Image courtesy of Unit LondonI was privileged enough to step into her world in 2023 when I visited London during the huge Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton: Creating Infinity (2023) takeover at Harrods, where the entire exterior and interior of the store was taken over by polka dots, a massive statue of her and the collection.
Images courtesy of TheIndustry.fashion
Standing beneath that huge statue outside Harrods, it was impossible to not feel the scale of what Kusama had accomplished: a body of work so singular and that she herself became iconography. That’s the strange, beautiful contradiction in her legacy; an artist who spent nearly five decades living by choice inside a psychiatric hospital is one of the most famous, publicly adored figures in contemporary art and pop culture.