Unknown Departure, the Most Mesmerizing One: Yayoi Kusama’s Immersive Universe—On a Date Together at “A Glance Back: Yayoi Kusama’s Avant-Garde Show”

Lin Chih-Hung

“I have dedicated all my life painting and creating, each day facing a new challenge in art. My art is everything to me; I have been burning with my infinite love for the universe, and this wonderful flame is still burning. Through time and space, till death and eternity, celebrating the beauty of love for the glory of humankind. This is the ultimate wish of my art life. The dedication for the universe and for the mystery of art, all inscribed in everything here and now.”—Yayoi Kusama.

Infinity Is the Universe

How does the incomprehensible immensity materialize in the form of images? Is the visual expression of “infinitude” more concrete than the abstract words? With the title “Infinity Net,” Kusama seems to suggest a poetic, romantic contradiction: since the images have fallen into the enormous net of images and are presented before the spectators, where does this “infinity” come from? Or, could this “infinity” be a running water flow toward somewhere way beyond the picture, endlessly extending in its network, pushing the spectator’s sight to the edge of the painting? Now that it’s wasting efforts to obtain water with a net, why does Kusama so insist in extending the universe as she could envision, with her life’s work?

Kusama is obsessed with the subject “infinity”. In her paintings, costumes in installations, furniture and soft sculptures, she uses nets and dots to surround people and the environment, and she extends those visual elements beyond measure with mirrors, absorbing everyone and everything. In Kusama’s works, the idea of “infinity” resists labels like monochromatic painting, pop art, minimalism, feminism, including their definition, and she does so by crossing over media, such as painting, sculpture, installation, conceptual art, and action art. Art critic Herbert Read concludes such infinite, indistinct and indefinite paintings with the perspective of “realizing the infinity of space.”

The Immersive Art That Dissolves the Self

Painting is the origin of all immersive installations for Kusama, her unique way in search for a world never before seen. In 1951, she took a picture of herself kneeling in the midst of paper-made works scattered on the floor, wearing costumes she designed and made herself to match her works. And so has become how she speaks for her own images.

March 1952, Kusama, 23, gave her first individual exhibition at the Daiichi Community Center of Matsumoto City, her native town. This event presented more than 200 works of watercolor, gouache and oil painting that she tirelessly created; the lace-like repeated and curved touches in the paintings she made in the infinite space within the frame foretold the birth of the “Infinity Net” series. Kusama enjoyed displaying multiple works at once within a closely intermingled context; this expresses her fondness and strategy of creating a space for immersive, intense experiences.

In October 1952, Kusama held her second exhibition in the same place. In both events, the space was laid out with dark-colored drapes to stimulate impressive experiences. Kusama has mentioned the two events several times in her autobiography; obviously, it is vital for her to exhibit in a particular environment. The press also reported the popularity of the events: “Kusama’s shows are crowded, filled with so many excited young people. They also said the same, that they don’t understand, they don’t understand; yet they kept looking at those works with such passions, as if they were captivated. Everyone was asking what Kusama was painting, what she was initially meant to paint. To questions like those, Kusama always said, “When I couldn’t express with words, I paint and try to speak with painting. If I could explain in words, I would write a novel so you could read it.”

In the pamphlet of the second event, poet and critic Shuzo Takiguchi wrote an article. In the piece he underlined ideas in flow between forms and made water and air as metaphors for the life force in flow in Kusama’s works: “Her images increasingly come to flow like the dam breaks down… The artist’s breath is transformed into the flow of nature, the handwriting… expressing so resolutely the energy of life.”

On December 17, 1963, Kusama gave the exhibition “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show” at Gallery Gertrude Stein. In this event, she expanded her interest in the network structure, where she presented a space of infinitude by covering the walls and ceiling with reticular formation. The black walls and ceiling were filled with posters of boat images, creating an impression of boats endlessly increasing, enclosing and spinning around the visitors. According to art critic Jill Johnston of ARTnews, the endless extension of images was meant to stimulate dizziness and illusion. This event is significant in that it marked a whole new creative chapter in Kusama’s installation art, as she began to explore different forms of immersion. As Kusama states, “it originates in a profound, strong impulse to materialize the repeated images in my mind by visible forms. When those images are liberated, they break through the restrictions of time and space.”

The Tale of Life and Love

In Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Room” series, the visitors find their body dissolved into the images and light all over. The infinite reflections of mirrors attract them toward Kusama’s own universe. Her later works continue her creative mentality to incorporate everyone and everything into her art universe. Buried in her “My Eternal Soul” series, Kusama appeared to return to the beginning and immerse herself in her works, enclosed by her paintings. The result was a way to preserve a consciousness beyond life and death; it could also be seen as a gesture of reconciliation, an attempt to connect the sky and earth. When all is dissolved that there is no more borderline between the sky and earth, it’s the tale of life and love Kusama tries to tell.

Since the early 2000s, Kusama became more into painting, and this goes back to her works in 1952 when she began as an artist in Matsumoto, her native city. Her favorite way of painting is to create a feel where the body dissolves, and she does so in painting a space where colors constantly and infinitely flow. “My Eternal Soul”, a series on which she had been working came to a high point, where she created another immersive environment for the visitors, with the overwhelming number of paintings laid-out all over the space: it is to “blend with eternity and become one. Erase your personality. Become a part of the place and forget yourself.

The Connection of Dots and Net, the Senses of Love and Beauty

So how does one imagine a world without Yayoi Kusama? Her art is an aesthetic guide for our generation, calling for us to think, act and make changes. Back to 2004, the traveling exhibition “KUSAMATRIX” at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Kusama presented the two nostalgic and autobiographic installation works “Hi, Konnichiwa!”and “Love Forever”, along with 100-plus portraits of avant-garde, fashionable young girls painted on celluloid films. The works for this exhibition were made from a dream that never came true, as Kusama looked back in her younger time and those radical social changes she went through, yet she eventually materialized with a refreshed and curious eye toward this world. “Perhaps it’s the war. As a little girl I used to make dreams of all sorts, but none of them ever came true. Everyday was depressing and suffocating for me. But I still had hopes and ambitions for the future, and they were stronger than anyone else’s, so strong that they overwhelmed even me sometimes,” said Kusama.

Wearing dresses designed after those celluloid portraits, the faculty and students of the Bunka Fashion College of Tokyo took over Roppongi Hills and, in what followed, surrounded Kusama herself in the center of the stage at TV Asahi. Such performance act made Kusama’s work Dots Obsession-T.W.KEV (2005) a carnival, a cultural sensation, expressing the merging of her personal memories, the remarks of the time, collective mind and individual feelings. Playing in the image world where she freely decorated herself, Kusama articulated the multiplicity of a woman’s experiences through her perceptions of dots and net and with her sensitivity in details. With various characters and images coexisting in the world that took over a space crossing the frontiers, Kusama creates a place for all those attending this carnival to explore their own imaginations and desires.

And this carnival made the cityscape of Tokyo its stage, each character reflecting everyone living in the city. Under the constellation, before the mirror images, and in the midst of the ocean of flower blossom, all the inspirations and fun are gathered and lifted beyond. This event combined the interaction with the crowd and the exploration of the body, leading them to see the creative system of the art world with a new eye. All the various looks of the portraits of the young girls and their styles extended like tropical cyclones blowing everywhere; and hidden under Kusama’s lines and compositions were her attempt to build a stage of immersive experiences, through her paintings and signs, among the various lifestyles and cultures. Her attempt made clear that people had the same dreams, inspirations, fears and hopes, despite all the differences they might have in their lives and environments. Those costumes and designs, shaped by Kusama, witnessed the blend of old and new, classical and modern. She tried to tell us, the ode to feminine qualities is not to highlight women’s power to dress but to break the conventions; it’s a rebellious spirit before the world, in exaggerated, dramatic forms.