This blog is about the surprise of discovery and the power of art. Once again, one of these Tokyo weekends of taking our beloved bikes and heading off into the BIG city. A quick check of Tokyo web-sites for what's on (click here or here if you are curious) and we discovered one of our favorite museums:
... has another artist of who we knew nothing about: Yayoi Kusama. Ah yes... and spots seemed to be the theme of this artist.
We brought along two of our guests who are Polish cyclists touring Australia, New Zealand and Japan to share in the discovery.
T his Saturday we were once again transported into a breath taking world of expression and passion by Yayoi Kusama, an artist that we had not known,.
Yayoi Kusama, as it turns out, had had a long and famous/infamous artistic life spanning back to the early 70s in New York City. She returned to Japan in 1977 where she checked herself into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill. She has been living there since then producing a vast amount of art spanning painting, sculpture, novel writing, fashion design and interior decorating. Click here to find out more about her fascinating life and works.
We were able to have a quick visit with her before entering the exhibit.
Spots... and pumpkins. There are famous representations of huge pumpkins around Japan and the world done by her.
When we entered the exhibit we were stunned by the power and volume of her work! Since 2007 she has poured her energy into 500 (!!!) highly detailed, highly passionate and huge paintings. This gallery exhibited only 190 of them. Each one uniquely different and each one with a passionate title that went from romantic, to hope, to despair, to suicidal... then back again.
Check out the intensely detailed and huge work she does!
Some samples of painting titles:
The exhibit then branched out to some of her huge 3D sculptures that really reminded us of Niki St. Phalle (from another blog of ours; see here)
It then went into exhibits of some of her other work which includes interior design:
(Would this clash with any of your other furniture?)
She wrote a whole series of novels (one of the more strange ones):
She also was well known for her art happenings in New York in the 1970s (of course with dots):
Now in her 80s, wherever she has a show around the world it generates huge excitement and long lines (8 hours in New York; click here)
Her last gift is that you get sticky dots as you leave and you go through an interior room with white furniture... to create your own work of art:
This room travels around the world with the exhibit to create an international art-piece.
We left the exhibit breathless, having felt alternately lifted up, pounded down, drawn in, repulsed and consumed by her vision and her art. We ambled through the lobby of this amazing museum ....
de-briefing together and being inspired by our surroundings. Here is to a very powerful artist whom we just discovered... are we the last ones to know about her? Did you know about Yayoi Kusama??
In summer 2017 Hope and I went to the extremely popular Yayoi Kusama "Infinity Mirrors" exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. It had the apply-your-own-dots room, which was fun. Seattle's Zoë Dusanne Gallery hosted Yayoi Kusama's first US art show in 1957. We had seen some of her work at the Seattle Art Museum a few years back (before 2017, not before 1957). We also saw store displays of her work in Paris in August 2012 after she had had a big exhibition at the Pompidou Center earlier in the year.
ReplyDelete