Outsiders: Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (1929 - present) is a contemporary Japanese artist working across painting, sculpture, film, and installation. She has produced a body of work formally unified by its use of repetitive dots, pumpkins, and mirrors. She 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. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

For Further Reading:

• An Introduction to Yayoi Kusama
• Yayoi Kusama by Grady T. Turner
• Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary survival story

This month we're talking about Outsiders -- women who marched to the beat of their own drum and rejected stereotypes about what women "should" be. They are aesthetic pioneers, norm-benders, and often the only woman in their field.

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Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more. Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.

Womanica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Grace Lynch, Maddy Foley, Brittany Martinez, Edie Allard, Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Taylor Williamson, Sara Schleede, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Luci Jones, Abbey Delk, Adrien Behn, Alyia Yates, Vanessa Handy, Melia Agudelo, and Joia Putnoi. Special thanks to Shira Atkins.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello from Wonder Media Network. I'm Jenny Kaplan and this
is Wamanica. This month, we're talking about outsiders, women who
marched to the beat of their own drum and rejected
stereotypes about what women should be. Their esthetic pioneers, norm benders,
and often the only women in their field. Today, we're
talking about an obsessive artist. She defied her family, societal expectations,

(00:24):
and artistic conventions to dedicate herself to her vision. Through
psychiatric challenges and countless hours of work and repetition, the
Princess of Polka Dots has created an iconic universe. Please welcome.
Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama was born in nineteen twenty nine
in Matsumoto, a city in central Japan. Although these were

(00:48):
the interwar years, Yayoi's family was relatively unaffected. They were
wealthy business owners who ran a plant nursery selling seeds, seedlings,
and flowers. Yeoi's traditional family disproved of her early interest
in art. She describes her mother in particular as having
been extremely violent. Quote, she hated to see me painting,

(01:09):
so she destroyed the canvasses I was working on. Yeyoi
continued to paint anyway. When she couldn't afford materials, she
painted on cardboard or jute sacks. During World War II,
Yayoi and many of her peers were conscripted to contribute
to the war effort. At just fifteen years old, she

(01:30):
sewed for up to twelve hours a day in a
parachute factory. Still she made the time to paint. She
later said, painting pictures seemed to be the only way
to let me survive in this world and was rather
like an outburst of my passion and desperation. After the war,
when Yayoi was still a teenager, she convinced her family

(01:52):
to allow her to go to Kyoto to study painting.
The move also served as an escape from her unhappy
home life. In Kyoto, Yayoi trained in the traditional Japanese
painting styles, an approach that she found overly conservative. She
felt her instructors were out of touch and hardly attended
her classes, though she continued to paint on her own.

(02:13):
It was around this time that Yeyoi began to undergo
psychiatric treatment to treat emotional instability and hallucinations. One of
her works from that time, titled Accumulation of the corpses
bears early marks of her style, undulating forms, repetitive shapes
in a saturation of color. At the center, two trees
reached into the only open space on the canvas, life

(02:36):
struggling to survive amidst a bleak ravaged landscape. This painting
was among more than one hundred works that Yayoi presented
in her first solo show in nineteen fifty two, just
before her twenty third birthday. Despite her early recognition, Yeyoi
felt constrained by Japan. She later wrote, for art like mine,

(02:57):
art that does battle at the border of life and death,
questioning what we are and what it means to live
and die. It was too small, too servile, too feudalistic,
and too scornful of women. My art needed a more
unlimited freedom in a wider world. Yeyoi arrived in New
York City in the summer of nineteen fifty eight. Before

(03:19):
leaving Japan, her mother had given her one million yen
about forty five thousand dollars to day, and told Yeyoi
to never step foot in her mother's house again. Yeyoi
destroyed most of her existing work. Now she could start
anew from the studio she rented in the East Village.
At the time, action painting, in which the painter dribbled, splashed,

(03:40):
and threw paint onto a canvas was all the rage
in New York. Yeyoi wanted to carve a different direction.
She threw herself into obsessively painting large works with a
single dominant color. Take for example, her all white paintings
on massive canvases that were inspired by the patterns of
the Pacific Ocean she had seen on her flight from Japan.

(04:00):
She called this series infinity Nets because of the countless
tiny white loops painted over a black background. Close up,
you can see the interconnected ridges of accumulated paint. Take
a step back and you see the whole, a net
that seems to extend beyond and into the canvas. Yeyoi
sometimes worked for days at a time on her Infinity

(04:22):
Net series, losing herself in a trance like state. Sometimes
this absorbing work spurred her hallucinations once the net appeared
to crawl under her hands. Though she initially struggled to
gain the same recognition and success as her male peers,
Yeyuoi's work was featured in exhibitions, and she exploded onto
New York's avant garde scene, particularly as pop art was growing.

(04:45):
She continued to paint and also delved into other mediums.
She created her first signature sculptures of furniture covered in
stuffed fabric shapes, designed clothes, made films, and worked with
photographers to document her life. For example, the Nighttime ten
sixty six photo series titled Walking Piece depicts Yayoi walking
the streets of New York alone through a fish eye lens,

(05:07):
wearing a pink flower print kimono. Here she was an
outsider roaming through a foreign city on her own terms.
Throughout the nineteen sixties, Yeyui exhausted herself, putting out a
huge volume of work. Two particular forms emerged that would
come to stand in as symbols of her art, the
Polka dot and the Infinity room. She placed Poka dots

(05:30):
on everything, paintings, mannequins, stuffed fabric, fallacies, and even nude
performers in public. Meanwhile, in nineteen sixty five, she accomplished
a long held dream of creating an endless mirror room.
Viewers would peer through peat poles into a hexagonal chamber
lined with mirrors that reflected the viewer and flashing carnival
lights above. One critic described the work as a depthless,

(05:53):
receding blaze of lights in the farthest distance, a shimmering
milky way. In the early nineteen seventies, Yeyoi returned to
Japan to address her deteriorating health. She was experiencing undiagnosed
physical and mental pain. The former turned out to be
an autoimmune disorder. The latter was diagnosed as obsessive compulsive neurosis,

(06:17):
for which Yayoi was hospitalized in nineteen seventy five. She
has voluntarily lived in this hospital ever since, as it
offers a safe and supportive environment for her needs, and
she keeps a studio nearby where she continues to work.
In an interview, she once said, my art originates from hallucinations.
Only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional

(06:38):
images that plague me onto sculptures and paintings. All my
works and pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis, and
are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. After a few
quiet years, it seemed like the world had forgotten about
Yoyoi's work, but she never stopped making art. And a
couple of hugely successful ECS exhibitions in the eighties and

(07:01):
nineties catapulted her into worldwide fame. In nineteen ninety three,
she was the first solo artist to represent Japan in
the Venice bienale Yeoi is now ninety six years old
and is herself a recognizable image, known for sporting a
bright red bob and polka dotted clothing. Her exhibitions draw
massive crowds, and she's indisputably among the world's top selling

(07:23):
and best known living artists. Of her life, she said,
I want younger people or everyone to talk about my
enthusiasm reaching to space and also my art as a
token of my life even after my death. For that reason,
I worked all this morning. I'd like to keep creating
art until the day I die. All month, we're talking

(07:44):
about Outsiders. For more information, find us on Facebook and
Instagram at Wamanica podcast special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my
favorite sister and co creator. Talk to you tomorrow.