VOGUE:THE CULTURE EDIT. ANYTHING BUT FASHION!

 

Yayoi Kusama

Kusama Fashion, New York, 1970 © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc

THE influence of artist Yayoi Kusama has never been more apparent than it is today. With the announcement of her new collaboration with Louis Vuitton - a fashion collection inspired by her work - and her current extensive retrospective at London's Tate Modern, the Japanese 83-year-old is fast becoming one of this year's most talked-about artists.

Kusama was fascinated by art from an early age, using it as a means to escape her difficult childhood - during which her mother made her spy on her father's philandering, which had a lasting, traumatic effect of how the artist stills sees sex.



Yayoi Kusama in 1965 © Yayoi Kusama/Victoria Miro Gallery/Eikoh Hosoe

She first became known in the art world in Sixties New York, when her abstract, conceptual work was shown alongside Andy Warhol and George Segal. Her signature is unarguably her psychedelic, brightly-coloured, often mirrored spots - or Infinity Nets as the artist herself calls them - which came directly from hallucinations that Kusama still suffers from. In the mid-to-late Sixties, she organised a host of ticketed orgies and experimental performances, during which the artist painted dancers with huge spots. "Some of the naked happenings in New York were against the Vietnam War because the human body is too beautiful to be killed in that way," she told Time Out in February this year. "There were also naked anti-tax happenings because nudism doesn't cost money."



Self-Obliteration 1967 © Yayoi Kusama and Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc

Kusama returned to her native Japan in 1973 to discover that the country's art scene was more conservative than New York's and her business folded. Following a spate of mental problems, in 1977 she admitted herself into a psychiatric hospital - where she still lives voluntarily. Depending on her health, she travels across the road to her studio every day. She has penned several books, all of which give an insight into her mind and motivations. "I don't consider myself an artist," she said in an essay, Odyssey of My Struggling Soul. "I am pursuing art in order to correct the disability which began in my childhood.''



I'm Here, but Nothing, 2000/2012 © Lucy Dawkins/Tate Photography

Her works are largely autobiographical and are strongly influenced by her obsessiveness and desire to free herself from psychological trauma, as seen in her immersive installations that allow viewers to step inside, what Marc Jacobs describes as, a "world that never ends".



SEE WHY MARC JACOBS LOVES KUSAMA


Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011 © Yayoi Kusama/Lucy Dawkins/Tate Photography


24 May, 2012
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