In 1973, after a decade or so making shockwaves across the art world, Yayoi Kusama checked herself into a mental health facility. The artist, now 95 years old and still residing in the same Tokyo center, voluntarily committed herself after her mental health struggles became all too great. She found a hospital with sympathetic doctors as interested as her in using art as a therapy to help heal a suffering mind. No longer producing works for a public audience, Kusama found solace in directing her psychic anguish toward private labor: “In my work, I’m giving a system to my life.”
It’s from this humble daily practice that the reclusive artist has produced a grand and dazzling body of work. Recent years have seen her receive critical reappraisal and be deified into a mystical cultural icon. Her public art has charmed cities across the globe (see her bulbous sculptures), and her infinity rooms have besotted social media users.
“Yayoi Kusama,” a blockbuster summer show at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, is billed as Australia’s largest showing of the Japanese artist’s work in the southern hemisphere. The nonagenarian is one of the world’s most popular and sought-after living artists, with art that keenly delivers for our 21st-century appetites for spectacle, experience and social cred.
The namesake exhibition, featuring no less than 180 works, places a special emphasis on Kusama’s infinity spaces, largely because they prove such a major drawcard in attracting Instagram-eager crowds. (Be warned, there are strict time limits for those rooms, so be quick with your camera.) But the most insightful, even edifying, parts of “Yayoi Kusama” exist beyond these spaces and are found viewing the artist’s unimposing and telling early pieces.
“We’ve got the crowd-pleasers,” Wayne Crothers, the NGV’s senior curator of Asian art, told Observer. “But our main aim here is to really ground her as a remarkable social and artistic story.”
The show is divided into two parts. The first is dedicated to her salad days growing up in rural Japan in the shadow of the Second World War and then starting an earnest career in America, shaking up the art world. The second showcases the hyperbolic patterned works and otherworldly physical spaces that have made Kusama a modern-day cultural phenomenon.
Finding, curating and exhibiting her under-appreciated artworks was a burning desire for Crothers. With the help of Kusama’s intermediaries and by networking with regional Japanese galleries, the NGV found several prized pieces from the beginnings of her career. “We’re really revealing a lot of archival material here, some surviving relics even,” Crothers said.
Ever since receiving a written reply from Georgia O’Keeffe, one that encouraged the aspiring artist to move to New York, Kusama has dared to be fearless in her artistry. Patterns and symbols, repeated over and over into “infinity,” became her dominant style. Early works, like her phallic renderings of furniture and domestic objects called Accumulations, highlight this obsessive interest in repetition, an aesthetic throughline Kusama would carry for the rest of her career.
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Replicating images and objects, whether phalluses or pumpkins, provided restorative comfort to Kusama, especially as her mental health began to worsen in America. As simplified and unvarying as it may sometimes appear, repeating a motif over and over to excess—as other Pop Art artists began doing in the 1960s—made Kusama a daring provocateur. Even more so because she was an Asian woman doing it.
This fact may be no truer than when she first appeared at the 1966 Venice Biennale. An uninvited guest, the young Kusama dispersed more than 1,000 shiny metallic balls on the show’s front lawn. The display, Narcissus Garden (recreated here in the NGV foyer), invited visitors to “buy their narcissism” for a few dollars apiece—until officials angrily stopped her.
A single silver ball from that installation would today sell for thousands of dollars alone—an almost perverse reminder of the high value her art now carries. (Kusama was recently the ninth highest-grossing artist at global art auctions and retains a market value nearing $176 million.) The contrast from this previous exercise—a protest on the commercialization of art—is a stark irony among many surrounding the Kusama phenomenon today.
The much-hyped infinity rooms, especially the new and exclusive My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light (2024), have a nauseating and hypnotic power that reflects Kusama’s life dedicated to producing “formless art.” They are also astral and aesthetic spaces the artist has pursued ever since 1964. With brightly speckled floating orbs and reflections that refract endlessly, visitors—except those mediating it entirely through their iPhone—can expect a kind of psychological self-obliteration, one that clearly allowed the young Kusama to liberate herself from her so-called “depersonalizations.”
Nowadays, spectacle and immersiveness are enticements for many to the gallery, but the personal story behind the work is a looming specter one shouldn’t ignore. Away from these experiential spaces, the life—and survival—of Kusama today is a heroic tale. Born almost a century ago in 1929, her early life was marked by severe trauma, not only because of World War II but also because of her mother’s perverted need to have her daughter watch her father’s adultery. A fear of the phallus and sex fueled much of Kusama’s early 1960s creations, with the practice of repeating the abject image and making it mundane a cathartic exercise.
Fertility, sex and cycles are constants in Kusama’s art, dating from early drawings of flowers (while living on a seed farm) to embryonic cell-like shapes in more recent paintings. Away from the infinity carnival, newer works (the artist still paints most days) quietly feature at “Yayoi Kusama,” carrying an authenticity and immediacy largely absent elsewhere. “They are very expressive, extremely colorful and almost homages to nature,” Crothers said. “That’s what her ongoing theme has been: a form of nature worship.”
What registers as most radical and affecting in the show can be found in the understated, deeply resonant print and archival pieces. Take the Every Day I Pray for Love series (2023), a garish sunflower-esque collection where red dots harmonize with green stripes. It’s an amalgamation of the infiniteness that so dominates Kusama’s oeuvre but appears far more harmonious and unassuming. Solace and calm are clearly imbued in the frame, and it’s palpable.
There’s also the video installation Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict (2010), which has the wig-wearing Kusama read out parts of her eponymous autobiographical novel about the depression she suffered while living in the U.S. Her poetic statements are prophetic (if also unsettling), reminding us of the deeply personal—and trauma-filled—nature of her seven-decade artistic quest. Images of her infinity rooms crash and unfold around her on the screen while she holds firm, singing of her desire to “tear down the gate of hallucinations.”
Finding grounding and material connection is what many may want after the chaos of the masses elbowing to access Kusama’s astral, Instagrammable spaces. Beyond selfies and mirrored self-annihilation, artworks outside the frenzied infinity halls of “Yayoi Kusama” are where one can find a far more penetrating experience. These paintings, drawings and reels reveal a long-tortured artist, still seeking relief, quietly seeking to be at one with themselves.
“Yayoi Kusama” is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, through April 21, 2025.
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