As a small girl, Yayoi Kusama would wander down to the flower fields owned by her wealthy family in Matsumoto, and daydream “among beds of violets” with her sketchbook. One day, suddenly, she saw faces on the flowers. “To my astonishment they were talking to me,” she wrote decades later in her autobiography. “The voices quickly grew in number and volume, until the sound of them hurt my ears. I had thought that only humans could speak, so I was surprised the violets were using words. I was so terrified my legs began shaking.”
This was no child’s fantasy but a genuinely disturbing hallucination, and the first of what she would call “depersonalisations” that would haunt her for decades to come. Since the 1970s Kusama has lived voluntarily in an Tokyo institution; she walks from there to her studio each day, where she obsessively makes art using the same symbols that fascinated her as a child (flowers, polka dots, pumpkins) to explore her fears (sex, war, oblivion). “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art,” she once said.
At 95, Kusama is among the world’s most famous living artists, and indisputably the world’s top-selling female artist. Her fat pumpkin sculptures have charmed cities around the globe. She has her own five-storey gallery in Tokyo. In her red wig she is as recognisable as her work, rare for an artist; a giant inflatable sculpture of her was recently perched on the outside of Louis Vuitton’s flagship store in Paris, like an arty King Kong.
But it is her kaleoidoscopic infinity rooms that draw the biggest crowds, the thousands willing to wait hours for just enough time inside to snap a photo for the ’gram. The National Gallery of Victoria’s enormous new Kusama show, opening in Melbourne on Sunday, has 10 of her immersive artworks – a record - including an entirely new infinity room titled My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light, which will induce the most disco bout of vertigo you have ever had. Try as you might, as soon as you go in, your fingers will itch to pull out your phone. It is going to create queues Lune Croissanterie could only dream of.
“Do you mind if I brag?” says Wayne Crothers, the NGV’s senior curator of Asian art, as we walk through the exhibition. While there have been other Kusama shows staged with “about 20 or 30 more works”, this is the biggest ever in terms of scale. There’s plenty of space for the huge sculptures, including the joyous Dancing Pumpkin in the foyer (which the NGV has permanently acquired); and the Narcissus Garden, which was first unveiled at the 1966 Venice Biennale when Kusama rocked up – uninvited - and began selling reflective orbs for 1,200 lira a pop. (She was shut down after two days, because Biennale authorities objected to her “selling art like hot dogs or ice-cream cones”.)
And of course, her infinity rooms, which required some careful planning so people can get their allotted 30-40 seconds inside without a crush. “In an ideal world, you could take as long as you like – but people don’t put limits on themselves,” Crothers says.
For better or worse, Kusama’s popularity has played a role in the proliferation of camera-friendly experiences at art galleries; the New York Times once sniffed that her shows “have become the art world’s equivalent of Star Wars premieres”. But so much of the pleasure of the NGV’s new exhibition is not found in giant pumpkins and mirror rooms, but the rarely seen early works that have been wheedled out of some closely guarded collections. These include one of her first surviving pieces: a portrait that Kusama drew at the age of nine or 10: an unknown woman whose face is covered in polka dots.
“We wanted to show people that you don’t just arrive at the point of giant pumpkins and infinity rooms instantaneously,” says Crothers. “This is a life pursuit that spans eight and a half decades. And I don’t think there’s ever been another artist that you could do that with, in the whole world.”
Art was a way for young Kusama to work through her hallucinations, and escape her traumatic home life. Her mother was physically abusive and tasked her daughter with spying on her father’s adultery, an experience that instilled a contempt for male genitalia that can be seen in her phallic soft sculpture works from the 60s and 70s. Against the wishes of her family, Kusama dedicated herself to being a professional artist in her early 20s; one contemporary Japanese newspaper report says she was producing 70 works a day, obsessively painting dots and net patterns with ink and paint.
Perhaps the most revelatory part of the NGV show documents Kusama’s time in 1960s America. She escaped a stagnant post-war Japan in 1957 with 1m yen stitched into her clothes and a suitcase of silk kimonos to sell, and eventually made her way to New York, where her art became more outlandish and performative. She protested the Vietnam war by staging orgiastic naked gatherings, and wrote an open letter to Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him if he ended the conflict (“Let’s forget ourselves, dearest Richard, and become one with the Absolute,” she wrote). She turned her eye to sexual liberation, starting a magazine called Orgy, which covered what you’d expect (“We had to be very careful about which pages we display,” says Crothers). She even officiated gay weddings as “the high priestess of polka dots”.
But Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, and institutionalised herself to treat her increasingly intrusive neurosis and hallucinations. Her art returned to paper, became delicate and introspective. “Nowadays art therapy is all the rage. But even when she was a child, she found the production of art very therapeutic, and that is maybe one of the reasons why she just produced so much work in her 20s, to deal with those experiences she was having,” Crothers says. “But those were heady days in New York – endless parties, very little sleep, probably too many drugs. I think a lot of people were hungover by the 70s.”
By the 1980s, Kusama was in “pumpkin mania”, as Crothers puts it. The artist had been obsessed with them since she was a child: “I have always found them to be such tender things to touch and so wonderfully humourous, humble and appealing,” she said in 2019. Entering the glowing room titled The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens is instantaneously and oddly soothing. “You’ve been drawn into the spiritual world of the pumpkin,” says Crothers.
So much of Kusama’s work stems from repetition – rooms filled with glowing pumpkins, her intricate net paintings, her phallus sculptures, her never-ending dots and lines and faces. Obsession resulted in both her commercial success but also her torment; art was both a shield against mental illness and a product of it. “That is her whole life – the pushing and pulling,” says Crothers. “But she harnessed her obsession into something awe-inspiring.”
You can draw a line from that dotty child’s portrait from 1939 to the endless celestial universe of her latest infinity room 85 years later. “Some people might feel the mirror rooms can be a bit superficial, or knock her for things like the Louis Vuitton collaborations. Other people will love that,” says Crothers. “But they’ll all find her determined, experimental spirit really fascinating – because that is the great appeal of Kusama.”
Yayoi Kusama opens at the National Gallery of Victoria on Sunday and runs until 21 April 2025
