Yayoi Kusama

signed in English, titled in Japanese and dated 1992 on the reverse, framed

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Asia
Sotheby's, New York, 15 November, 2007, lot 290

This work is generally in good condition. There are minor wear and handling around the edges. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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 Alternate Universe
Yayoi Kusama

Arguably the most prominent Japanese female artist living today, Yayoi Kusama has for over six decades produced a phenomenal body of works that not only traversed through the limit of medium, culture, and space, but also powerfully shaped the course of Western contemporary art history. Unbounded by time and age, her international traveling retrospective at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and Whitney Museum from 2011 to 2012, as well as upcoming solo exhibitions in North America, Japan, South America, and Asia, further testify to the artist’s continual relevance and growing popularity among curators and critics in recent years. Sotheby’s is pleased to present five distinctive works between the late 1980’s and 2000’s that crucially trace the period of experimentations after Kusama’s permanent move to Japan in 1973, and more importantly, offer an in-depth survey of the signatory motifs and mediums that intricately form Kusama’s much celebrated psychedelic practice.

The artist has frequently stated hallucinations stemmed from childhood as a main inspiration behind her artistic creations. “The illness lets me just be an artist because it allows me to be free from common sense. To me, being an artist, art comes before anything else. And (my obsession) is an inspiration for my work; obsessional art, I call it.”¹ It has contributed endlessly to the birth of numerous visual icons, from the pumpkin image, Infinity Nets, phallus-like soft sculptures, polka dots, to the idea of “self-obliteration” that manifests into every medium possible. After a decade of revolutionizing the avant-garde scene in New York City from end of 50’s to early 70’s, Kusama’s deteriorating health condition has seen the artist’s return to her homeland in 1973. Her subsequent worsening hallucinatory visions further led her to permanently reside at a mental institution in Tokyo since 1977. The period between 1980’s and 2000’s certainly signifies a new phase in the artist’s career, when new paintings and sculptures, distinctive from her past practice, began to emerge from the renewed living environment.

 Painted in 1992, a year before Kusama’s participation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, the two paintings entitled Pumpkin (Lot 882 and 886) specifically salute to the bulbous pumpkin, a self-portrayal of the artist and one of the most ubiquitous motifs in her works. According to Kusama, her initial fascination with the pumpkin was originated from her childhood hallucinatory experience in her grandfather’s planting field. “I took down the pumpkins by the stems. Suddenly, they came alive and began talking to me … their lovely presence cannot be described.”² While the pumpkin’s first appearance can be dated back to as early as the artist’s nihonga practice at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1940’s, it later reappeared during 1980’s and 1990’s in the already mature polka dot form as seen in these two pieces. Both works are rendered in the popular yellow and black colour palette, yet their reverse colour arrangement and drastic difference in size aptly illustrate the versatile nature of the artist herself. Lot 886 is a large piece that depicts the iconic profile view of the pumpkin. The overall yellow on black combination and the square contours of the pumpkin remain as a favorite among Kusama’s acrylic painting works. The polka dot and infinity net patterns as seen on the body of the pumpkin and the background present subtle hints of proliferating growth and vegetation, and more importantly, pinpoints to the core framework of Kusama’s works: infinite repetition. On the other hand, Lot 882 especially features a vertical orientation and an aerial perspective that further magnifies the peculiar depiction of Kusama’s beloved plant, displaying a linkage with the artist’s own obsessive interest in the uncanniness and strangeness of nature.

While the pumpkin connects her overall creative outlet with the artist’s childhood, Kusama’s first foray into the New York art world can be signified by the Infinity Nets series, exhibiting in Kusama’s first solo exhibition at Brata Gallery in New York in 1959 and numerous group shows alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal. The monumental paintings broke through the boundaries of the avant-garde circle of the time, and ultimately became an emblematic visual code that the artist would revisit throughout her later career. As she once declared, “Painting, which is powerful enough to wrap up the whole universe, not to mention the earth, is Kusama’s Infinity Nets. I will probably continue to paint this endless wed, which I have worked on for the past 40 years. Yayoi Kusama is unchangeable.”³ Infinity Nets (Lot 888) from 2000 is precisely an extension to the original monochromatic paintings. Rendered in rare appearance of subtle metallic grey, the petite size work at once evokes the cathartic and repetitive painting process that methodically relieves the artist from her hallucinatory pain. The motif’s initial appearance can be traced back to an early series of watercolor works entitled Pacific Ocean from 1959. Created with a simple movement of the wrist, the organic pattern was a meditative channel for the artist to transcend the plague of ongoing hallucinations to the real world. The repetitive stream of minute painted arcs first caught the eyes of then art critic Donald Judd, who wrote in his 1959 essay, “The effect [of Kusama’s Infinity Nets] is both complex and simple. Essentially it is produced by the interaction of the two close somewhat parallel planes … at points merging at the surface plane and at others diverging slightly but powerfully.”⁴ Reaffirming Judd’s view, the overall reception to the early Infinity Nets paintings was positive. While some critics have praised Kusama’s bold ambition to overturn the popular Abstract Expressionism ideal at the time, others have later associated the repetitive and monotonous aesthetics of her works to giving rise to Andy Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper and Minimalism.

The repetitive scheme and obliteration process from the Infinity Nets can later on be seen in the form of mirrored installation, soft sculptures, and notorious performance works, endlessly covering ready-made objects and performers under a “net” of notable symbols such as phalluses and polka dots. Pollen (Lot 887) from 1986 is an exemplary soft sculpture work that brilliantly retains the surrealistic aesthetics of the soft sculptural Sex Obsession series in 1960s, in which Kusama covered the surface of furniture and readymade objects with multiple white phallic-shaped cushions. Once again obliterated by these phallus-like handsewed objects, now rendered in yellow, the sculpture stands at over one meter tall and takes the form of an organically grown plant. Unlike the pumpkin, the phallic symbol represents a fearful repulsion of the artist. As she once confessed, “Artists do not usually express their own psychological complexes directly, but I use my complexes and fears as subjects. I am terrified by just the thought of something long and ugly like a phallus entering me, and that is why I make so many of them.”⁵ In the new sculptural works from 1980s such as Pollen, critics have noted that unlike the original prototype, these protrusions have become elongated, taking to an almost snake-like form that expands beyond sexual interpretation.

As seen in Pumpkin and Pollen, the polka dot pattern contains a malleable and immersive presence that seeps through the veins of Kusama’s painting, drawing, sculptural, installations, and performance works. Indeed, Kusama believes that polka dots do not only exist in her works, but are intertwined with life. “Polka dots can’t stay alone, like the communicative life of people. Two and three and more polka dots become movement. Our earth is only one polka dot among the million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity.”⁶ Painted in a solid red palette, the delicate Dots (Lot 889) from 1989 is an acrylic painting work that suitably captures the omnipresent yet elusive motif on canvas. In the work, red polka dots in different sizes are meticulously arranged on a white background to fit within the parameter of the miniscule panel. The highly stylised aesthetics and flat clean surface are moreover refined features that only came to light in 1980s when Kusama began using acrylic paint, shifting away from the early thickly-coated oil paintings in New York.

Just like the infinite polka dot and infinity nets pattern that could proliferate across the surface of any objects, at the age of 84, the invigorated Yayoi Kusama does not show signs of slowing down, bearing a renewed enthusiasm in painting and drawing extraordinary works that continually attract academic and commercial attention from the art world. At the same time, the intricate web of motifs that follow through her entire career, as illustrated by the five lots on offer, would persist to influence countless artists in the new generations, creating an alternate universe within the contemporary art discourse where infinite possibilities await.

1 Kay Itoi, “Kusama Speaks”, Artnet Features 1997, 1997
2 Yayoi Kusama, Mugen No Ami- Kusama Yayoi Jiden, Bardon-Chinese Media Agency, 2002
3 Yayoi Kusama Recent Oil Paintings, Ota Fine Art, 1998
4 James Romaine, “Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets: Sublime or Spectacle?”, Cardus, 2009
5 Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern, 2012
6 Yayoi Kusama, Manhattan Suicide Addict, Kosakusha, Tokyo, 1978