Tribute to Kusama, Queen of Dots

Kusama brightened our lives with dots

The Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama passed away on Thursday at the age of 97 in a hospital in Tokyo. 

We were just reeling after the death of country singer Dolly Parton when news of Kusama was announced, though she died on August 14.

Many fans went onto social media to post pictures of themselves posing with Kusama's giant polka dotted yellow pumpkin on Naoshima Island, between the main islands of Honshu and Shikouku.

Her pumpkin on Naoshima Island

I have seen her smaller sculptures at Art Basel in Hong Kong, but in May this year I was able to experience one of her installations at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Entitled Infinity Mirrored Room -- Let's Survive Together limits a maximum of four people at a time, with only a minute in the room. Once you walk inside there are lots of shiny silver balls in a mirrored room, which makes it look endless, but is actually quite small.

In the middle is a hole you look through, and that too is infinity.

And your 60 seconds are up.

Since she was young she had hallucinations of seeing dots everywhere, and portrayed the world she saw in this way. Kusama seemed to have a penchant for wavy tentacles, voluptuous pumpkins, and balls. Lots of balls and dots.

When I first read about Kusama I was surprised to find she lived in a mental hospital, but perhaps it was easier for her to live this way, having others look after her while she just focused on her art?

It seems sad that her parents didn't appreciate her artistic potential -- they were more focused on getting her married off, something she completely detested. 

The mirrored room in the Art Gallery of Ontario

According to Wikipedia, her father was a womaniser, and Kusama's mother made her daughter spy on his affairs, which instilled a contempt for sex, and in particular men's sexual organs. Imagine how traumatic it must have been to deal with adult issues as a little girl!

Her parents' inability to accept Kusama for who she was only made her more determined to pursue art in the United States and went to New York.

While there she was poor and living in obscurity, though Kusama persisted in her vision of polka dot motifs, and eventually was noticed. Many liked the accessibility of her work, which was not pop art, nor splashing paint onto canvases like Jackson Pollock. She established her own style and stuck with it her whole career.

Interestingly she befriended artists like Andy Warhol and Georgia O'Keeffe, though Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 after living in New York for 15 years.

She found success with her mirrored room in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and later collaborated with fashion brands like Louis Vuitton thanks to Marc Jacobs, and even established her own fashion brand in 1968 called Kusama Fashion Company Limited.

I admire her wholehearted devotion to art that never strayed from her motifs like polka dots. She was dotty to the end.

An Artful Visit at the AGO

Jungen's Couch Monster outside the AGO

This morning I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) just as it opened at 10.30am and there was a line-up just to get in! Lots of eager art lovers keen to check it out. Admission for the day is C$30, but an annual pass is $40...

The museum is 480,000 sq ft, making it one of the largest art museums in North America, and the second-largest after the Royal Ontario Museum.

Oil sketches by the Group of Seven artists

It seems the AGO has no problems filling the space, as donors like Ken Thomson, who was one of Canada's richest men, donated many pieces of art, and in one room we got a small sampler of his taste in art (eclectic, fun, unique).

The museum also has quite the extensive collection of Group of Seven paintings. Not only finished paintings were presented, but alongside were many oil sketches, probably done in situ. These small works give viewers an idea of how the artist made the composition slightly or drastically differently, and that their impressionist style was already in these oil sketches. The colours seem to be quite similar.

There are a few paintings by Emily Carr that are scattered throughout the AGO too, but obviously not as big a collection as the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Riopelle's colourful, textural work

It was annoying though that captions were not placed with each work -- there was a large brochure in each gallery for visitors to use as a reference. Perhaps individually captioning them was seen as too busy, but the VAG does place it on the side so people can easily find the captions.

There was also a fantastic large square canvas by Jean-Paul Riopelle called Chevreuse II, where oil paint was scraped around the canvas to create new shades as well as textures. It looked extremely complicated but also chaotic and dynamism. Quite amazing that forgers think it's not hard to copy his style.

For something very different, there was a small contemporary exhibition of South Asian artist Ranbir Sidhu's three sculptures in a show called No Limits. He uses polished stainless steel as his medium to create his vision, hence "no limits". One called Fortress of Memory are 21 intricate cutout sculptures of an image of the Dastar Bunga, a style of turban whose name translates as "towering fortress" in Persian and Punjabi. 

Sidhu's Fortress of Memory

Another one looks like a futuristic, spiky-looking asteroid with blinking LED lights inside of it called Asteroid 3033 XI. 

Something in the AGO's permanent exhibition is Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room -- Let's Survive Forever. We had to wait for an attendant to let us in (maximum of four people), and before we went into the room we had to leave our bags outside. We were told we only had one minute to look around.

Inside the mirrored room were many silver balls, and after taking a video of the small room, time was almost up. The attendant asked, "Did you look in the column in the middle?" She had told us to be careful of the column when we went inside.

No we hadn't! We took a quick look to see ourselves mirrored inside more silver balls inside the mirrored column! It did indeed go on, forever.

Immersed in Kusama's mirrors

As we waited to go in, there was a video interview of Kusama and she talked about how she fought with her parents about her desire to become an artist. Her older sister had married well, into a family that was successful in business and why couldn't Kusama do the same?

She rebelled and refused to do any such thing and became even more obsessed with painting...

Outside the AGO is a curious sculpture by Aboriginal artist Brian Jungen. I love his work because he takes everyday objects and turns them into frighteningly beautiful things, like dinosaur-like creatures out of white plastic lawn chairs, or Nike basketball shoes into Aboriginal-like masks.

The AGO bronze piece is called Couch Monster, where he was inspired by Jumbo, a captive circus elephant who was killed by a train in St. Thomas, Ontario in 1885. Jungen called the work "couch monster" because capturing and training an elephant for the circus involves breaking the animal's will and spirit. 

As a result it is no longer an elephant, but a monster created by humans for their own entertainment. So Jungen's prototype involved reconfiguring couches to create the animal, balancing on a ball.

It's an arresting image, but also so thought-provoking.

Artful Socks

Socks inspired by Kusama's painting shown at M+

Merry Christmas!

Sometimes it can be hard to think of gifts for people, and this year I gave some people some fun socks from Goods Of Desire in Hong Kong -- one with pandas that look like the Japanese lucky cats, trams and taxis, and junks.

A good friend who visited M+ earlier this year gifted me a pair of socks from the contemporary art museum, a souvenir from Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama exhibition: Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.

The design of the socks was inspired by Kusama's painting, Time, Not Eternity, Self-Destruction Now, painted in 2020. She is a curious artist, obsessed with dots, and lives in a psychiatric institution through choice.

For her art is a method of healing. "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. Painting helps me to keep away thoughts of death for myself. That is the power of art," she said.

Is it any wonder that these socks are currently sold out?