Life is the Heart of the Rainbow
A visual story from 2017.
I was in Singapore, a favourite place where I just like to step outside and wander. Wandered towards the national gallery and discovered Yayoi Kusama.
I was immediately fascinated. This doesn’t mean I liked her art. 8 years later, I still don’t know if I do.
I am not immune to the cheerful melancholy whimsy of her installations but I am more fascinated by her obstinate artistic expression.
Her refusal to do “adult art”.
The now 96 year old Japanese multi-expression artist, famous for her polka dots and the fact she voluntarily lives in a mental asylum.
Is this what appeals to others? Kusama’s freedom to be… “crazy” AND in an 8 decade career, lucrative.
The National Gallery of Victoria recorded 570,537 visitors to their 4-month Yayoi Kusama exhibition, Dec 24 – April 25, making it the most visited ticketed exhibition ever staged in the Gallery’s history, a veritable “blockbuster”… a fact the Jason Farago said with a different tone in this 2019 NY times piece;
“… the 90-year-old Japanese mastermind of…obsessively dotted paintings, hallucinatory pumpkins and sometimes blandly decorative installations, have become the art world’s equivalent of Star Wars premieres.”
I respect Farago, have been a fan since this 2015 article about Indigenous Australian Artefacts and Art but … Star Wars is art too, plus her pieces look vaguely sci-fi.
Kusama’s bright yellow pumpkins with black dots are widely recognisable in pop culture, even if that’s all that gets recognised.
The NGV has acquired two of Kusama’s major works.
The first, the 5m tall sculpture titled Dancing Pumpkin, 2020.
“Dancing Pumpkin is one of Kusama’s largest and most ambitious imaginings of the pumpkin to date.
Taking her iconic motif into new conceptual terrain, the larger-than-life legs appear to twist and hover in the air, suggesting joyous movement.” – NGV
It was when she immersed herself in Nihonga [Japanese traditional] painting, around 1946, that the pumpkin motif emerged as a Kusama signature.
Pumpkins were a part of her childhood in Matsumoto, Japan, where her family were seed farmers. pumpkins being a major part of the Japanese diet, post WW2.
NGV’s other acquisition is Narcissus Garden [1966/2024], an installation of 1,400 glimmering silver spheres, Kusama’s imagining of the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection.
Narcissus Garden invites viewers to reflect on their reflections as they walk through a valley of irony.
