60 Facts About Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts.

Yayoi Kusama has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist.

Yayoi Kusama's work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Yayoi Kusama moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement.

Yayoi Kusama experienced a period in the 70s during which her work was largely forgotten, but a revival of interest in the 1980's brought her art back into public view.

Yayoi Kusama has continued to create art in various museums around the world, from the 1950s through the 2020s.

Yayoi Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility which she leaves daily to walk to her nearby studio to work.

Yayoi Kusama says that art has become her way to express her mental problems.

Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano.

Yayoi Kusama's mother was not supportive of her creative endeavors; Kusama would rush to finish her art because her mother would take it away to discourage her.

Yayoi Kusama's mother was physically abusive, and Kusama remembers her father as "the type who would play around, who would womanize a lot".

When Yayoi Kusama was ten years old, she began to experience vivid hallucinations which she has described as "flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots".

Yayoi Kusama's art became her escape from her family and her own mind when she began to have hallucinations.

Yayoi Kusama was reportedly fascinated by the smooth white stones covering the bed of the river near her family home, which she cites as another of the seminal influences behind her lasting fixation on dots.

When Yayoi Kusama was 13, she was sent to work in a military factory where she was tasked with sewing and fabricating parachutes for the Japanese army, then embroiled in World War II.

Yayoi Kusama's childhood was greatly influenced by the events of the war, and she claims that it was during this period that she began to value notions of personal and creative freedom.

Yayoi Kusama went on to study Nihonga painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948.

Yayoi Kusama has stated that she began to consider Japanese society "too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women".

Yayoi Kusama stayed there for a year before moving on to New York City, following correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe in which she professed an interest in joining the limelight of the city, and sought O'Keeffe's advice.

Yayoi Kusama established other habits too, like having herself routinely photographed with new work and regularly appearing in public wearing her signature bob wigs and colorful, avant-garde fashions.

Yayoi Kusama counted Judd and Joseph Cornell among her friends and supporters.

Around this time, Yayoi Kusama was hospitalized regularly from overwork, and O'Keeffe persuaded her own dealer Edith Herbert to purchase several works to help Yayoi Kusama stave off financial hardship.

Yayoi Kusama was not able to make the money she believed she deserved, and her frustration became so extreme that she attempted suicide.

In 1968, Yayoi Kusama presided over the happening Homosexual Wedding at the Church of Self-obliteration at 33 Walker Street in New York and performed alongside Fleetwood Mac and Country Joe and the Fish at the Fillmore East in New York City.

Yayoi Kusama opened naked painting studios and a gay social club called the Kusama 'Omophile Kompany.

In 1966, Yayoi Kusama first participated in the Venice Biennale for its 33rd edition.

Yayoi Kusama then began a passionate, platonic relationship with the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell.

Yayoi Kusama was in ill health, but continued to work, writing shockingly visceral and surrealistic novels, short stories, and poetry.

Yayoi Kusama became so depressed she was unable to work and made another suicide attempt, then in 1977, found a doctor who was using art therapy to treat mental illness in a hospital setting.

Yayoi Kusama checked herself in and eventually took up permanent residence in the hospital.

Yayoi Kusama has been living at the hospital ever since, by choice.

Yayoi Kusama's studio, where she has continued to produce work since the mid-1970s, is a short distance from the hospital in Tokyo.

Yayoi Kusama's painting style shifted to high-colored acrylics on canvas, on an amped-up scale.

Yayoi Kusama's move to Japan meant she had to build a new career from scratch.

Yayoi Kusama's later installation I'm Here, but Nothing is a simply furnished room consisting of table and chairs, place settings and bottles, armchairs and rugs, however its walls are tattooed with hundreds of fluorescent polka dots glowing in the UV light.

Yayoi Kusama continued to work as an artist in her ninth decade.

Yayoi Kusama has harkened back to earlier work by returning to drawing and painting; her work remained innovative and multi-disciplinary, and a 2012 exhibition displayed multiple acrylic-on-canvas works.

Later in 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo, featuring her works.

Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING will be on view and accessible to the public through 2024.

Bedatri D Choudhury has described how Kusama feeling not in control throughout her life made her, either consciously or subconsciously, want to control how others perceive time and space when entering her exhibits.

In Yayoi Kusama's Walking Piece, a performance that was documented in a series of eighteen color slides, Kusama walked along the streets of New York City in a traditional Japanese kimono while holding a parasol.

Yayoi Kusama then turned and cried without reason, and eventually walked away and vanished from view.

Yayoi Kusama was able to highlight the stereotype in which her white American audience categorized her, by showing the absurdity of culturally categorizing people in the world's largest melting pot.

The 1967 experimental film, which Yayoi Kusama produced and starred in, depicted Yayoi Kusama painting polka dots on everything around her including bodies.

In 1991, Yayoi Kusama starred in the film Tokyo Decadence, written and directed by Ryu Murakami, and in 1993, she collaborated with British musician Peter Gabriel on an installation in Yokohama.

In 2009, Yayoi Kusama designed a handbag-shaped cell phone entitled Handbag for Space Travel, My Doggie Ring-Ring, a pink dotted phone in accompanying dog-shaped holder, and a red and white dotted phone inside a mirrored, dotted box dubbed Dots Obsession, Full Happiness With Dots, for Japanese mobile communication giant KDDI Corporation's "iida" brand.

In 2011, Yayoi Kusama created artwork for six limited-edition lipglosses from Lancome.

In 1977, Yayoi Kusama published a book of poems and paintings entitled 7.

In 2010, Yayoi Kusama designed a Town Sneaker styled bus, which she titled Mizutama Ranbu and whose route travels through her hometown of Matsumoto.

That same year, Yayoi Kusama conceived her floor installation Thousands of Eyes as a commission for the new Queen Elizabeth II Courts of Law, Brisbane.

In 1959, Yayoi Kusama had her first solo exhibition in New York at the Brata Gallery, an artist's co-op.

Yayoi Kusama showed a series of white net paintings which were enthusiastically reviewed by Donald Judd.

Yayoi Kusama has since exhibited work with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, among others.

Yayoi Kusama's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

In 2017, a fifty-year retrospective of Yayoi Kusama's work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC.

That same year, the Yayoi Kusama Museum was inaugurated in Tokyo.

Yayoi Kusama has received many awards, including the Asahi Prize ; Ordre des Arts et des Lettres ; the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Order of the Rising Sun ; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art.

In October 2006, Yayoi Kusama became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's highest honors for internationally recognized artists.

Yayoi Kusama received the Person of Cultural Merit and Ango awards.

Yayoi Kusama's work has performed strongly at auction: top prices for her work are for paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s.