Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is widely considered to be one of the most important living modern artists.
Kusama’s work — specifically, her use of dots — integrates fine art with craft, mixes masculine with feminine, and explores her connection to the universe.
Her “Infinity Rooms” received international recognition, touring around the world for over two decades, with many of them remaining permanent fixtures in museums.
Yayoi Kusama is one of the most important living modern artists of our time. Hailing from Japan, Kusama grew up in an unloving family during the second World War, often experiencing vivid hallucinations within nature. The traumatic experiences of her youth, she says, have heavily contributed to her incredibly colorful and detailed pieces. Kusama’s work — specifically, her use of dots — explores identity and oneness with the world; a universal connection to everything it touches.
One of her earliest works, “Infinity Nets,” showed a series of small interconnected waves of white dots, creating a stunning optical illusion. It was the beginning of Kusama’s integration of fine art with craft, mixing of masculinity and femininity, and a greater connection to the entire universe. She was a strong voice in the 1960’s hippie counterculture and sexual revolution, and has continued to call for world peace and unity both publicly and through her work.
Her “Infinity Rooms” received international recognition, touring around the world for over two decades, with many of them remaining permanent fixtures in museums. In them, mirrors are attached to every surface in a room, often accompanied by illuminated pumpkins, the dotted phallic appendages she has since become famous for, or mirrored orbs. “I’ve always been interested in the mystique that a mirrored surface presents,” Kusama told the Wall Street Journal. “In my mirror rooms, you see yourself as an individual reflected in an expansive space. But they also give you the sensation of cloistering yourself in another world.”
Kusama has collaborated with a number of designers such as Lancome, Marc Jacobs, and Louis Vuitton, as well as establishing her own fashion brand Kusama Fashion Company Ltd. Her status as a cultural icon continues through her highly publicized work, and she is considered by many to be “the most beloved artist on the planet.”
