I think I will be able to, in the end, rise above the clouds and climb the stairs to Heaven, and I will look down on my beautiful life, said Yayoi Kusama, one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.
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Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, as the youngest of four children in an affluent family. Although she makes lots of different types of art: paintings, sculptures, performances and installations – they have one thing in common, dots.
Kusama's mother was not supportive of her creative endeavors and Kusama would rush to finish her art because her mother would take it away to discourage her.
Kusama's art became her escape from her family and her own mind when, as a child, she began to have hallucinations which she has described as "flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots". Kusama has been always open about her mental health. She says that art became her way to express her mental disease. Kusama's traumatic childhood, including her fantastic visions, can be said to be the origin of her artistic style.
Kusama went on to study Nihonga painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo in the 1950s.
She 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. Once in the United States, Kusama was free to explore her artistic expression that was censored while living in Japan.
Kusama's expansive 2021 exhibition at the is finally set to open this April with outdoor installations across the garden's landscape.
Four of the projects will be making their New York City debut from Saturday, April 10 to Sunday, October 31, 2021. The most exciting of which will surely be Infinity Mirrored Room -Illusion Inside the Heart, which will be housed in a cube-shaped structure located out in the open.
Elsewhere, there will be an interactive greenhouse installation, in which visitors will be invited apply stickers picturing coral-colored blossoms throughout the interior - thus taking part in one of Kusama’s signature "obliteration" pieces.
Also on view will be two new outdoor monumental sculptures, the self-explanatory Dancing Pumpkin and a 13-foot high biomorphic form featuring a polka-dotted face called I Want to Fly to the Universe.