Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生 Kusama Yayoi^?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japaneseartist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture,performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of thepop art, minimalist and feminist artmovements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol andClaes Oldenburg.^[1] Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out ofJapan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano into an upper-middle-class family of seedling merchants,^[2] Kusama started creating art at an early age, going on to study Nihongapainting in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and Americanavant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by theabstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary mediums, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited alongside the likes ofAndy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal during the early 1960s, where she became associated with the pop artmovement. Embracing the rise of the hippiecounterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention after she organised a series of Body Festivals in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots.

In 1973, Kusama moved back to her native Japan, where she found the art scene far more conservative than that in New York. Becoming an art dealer, her business folded after several years, and after experiencing psychiatric problems, in 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself to a hospital, where she has spent the rest of her life. From here, she continued to produce artworks in a variety of mediums, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several novels, a poetry collection and an autobiography.

Kusama's work is based in conceptual artand shows some attributes of feminism,minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and Tate Modern, whilst in 2008Christies New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.^[3]