Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now at the M+ was the largest retrospective of the artist in Asia outside of Japan. Clustered into six themes, the works evoke a sense that the stuff animating you, me, and everything is the same. The recognition of that is gentle but powerful as a tool to dissociate us from the modern ills plaguing us all.

Written by Jaymes Shrimski
Images provided by The M+
July 26, 2023

“What is most personal is most universal,” wrote ​​American psychologist Carl Rogers. 

Perhaps that assertion is at the heart of what makes Yayoi Kusama’s body of work so potent. Just as she remedies her own suffering through her work, as she tries to apprehend the vast concept of infinity and her own miniscule place in it, she captures each of us longing for the same understanding. But while we humbly scratch at the existence of our tiny selves in the all-consuming universe, Yayoi, emboldened with a heightened sensitivity to the concept and a unique creative capacity—and exceptional work ethic—creates works of incredible scale across a multitude of media. 

With a signature knack for peculiarity and kookiness, of electric color, polka dots, pumpkins, stuffed phalli, and repetition, Yayoi has cracked through creating art for gallery consumption and into mainstream consciousness. Something can now be “Yayoi-like.” 

The childlike spirit keeps dancing throughout her works even though the work often reflects on and rebels against topics both difficult and lofty—sexual anxiety, death, the infinite. And brands like Louis Vuitton have harnessed that spirit in collaborative pieces, furthering the appeal of the original Yayoi pieces—the most pure representations of her visions.

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now at the M+ in Hong Kong, which featured over 200 works from the iconic artist from November 2022 until May 2023, gave audiences access to the largest retrospective of the artist in Asia outside of Japan. Aside from chasing the origins of her practice through six themes, three completely new works were open for viewing. 

Death of Nerves (2022) featured prominently in the M+ Lightwell, extending bright, soft fabrics across three floors of the building, evoking the interconnectedness of a circulatory system. The work is accompanied by a poem, “On My Death of Nerves,” where the artist begins at the scene of a suicide with “nerves scattered voicelessly over the ground.” But they revive. “They burst into beautifully vibrant colors,” she writes, filling viewers with hope of what’s beyond—a sense of rebirth. 

Such is the childlike dance of Yayoi’s work, the rollercoaster of bright color born of weighty themes.

Pumpkin (2022) in the main hall is two large pumpkin sculptures blanketed in the pattern that renders any object “Yayoi-like.” Born in 1929 into a family maintaining a successful plant nursery in Matsumoto, Yayoi has long identified with plants and views them as fellow life-forms animated by the same spirit as humans. One exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York even suggested that “[t]he pumpkin came to represent for [Yayoi] a kind of alter-ego or self-portrait.”

The last of the three new works on display was Dots Obsession—Aspiring to Heaven’s Love (2022), a mirrored space containing polka dots and massive suspended balloons. Inside, a viewer feels gone. As though you were hit over the head with something heavy and you’re floating outside of lucidity and close to whatever the “next life” is. Scientists have taken to using the Infinite Monkey Theorem to give us all some idea of just how vast infinity is: “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

But Yayoi gives infinity, the sense of being completely consumed by the entirety of mass, texture. Simply gone.

An Artist Healing Herself and All of Us

Before she was wrestling with the vastness of everything, Yayoi at around age 10 was painting using polka dots and nets as motifs. By her own account, it was around this time that she was experiencing hallucinations involving fields of dots—the same dots which now cover so much of her work and which have found the most popularity.

Moving to the United States in 1957, Yayoi with minimal formal training, having studied art only briefly (1948–49) at the Kyōto City Specialist School of Arts, set to work on large paintings, soft sculptures, and environmental sculptures using mirrors and lights. She gained notoriety in the 1960s staging body painting festivals, fashion shows, and anti-war demonstrations. These “happenings” often involved public nudity.

One such happening took place in the fountain of the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Called “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead” (1969), Yayoi painted her signature dots on the bodies of the nude participants. These stagings seem to draw on a recurring theme in Yayoi’s body of work—self-obliteration. That is, her concept of reuniting the self with the universe by “obliterating” the notion of the individual person. The addition of dots, the same dots which map Yayoi’s Infinity Nets, seems to evoke the connection of the individual to infinity.

Moving back to Japan in 1973 and, by her own choice, living in a mental hospital since 1977, Yayoi continued producing work at a feverish pace, even staging yet another “happening” in Japan in 1983. “Self Obliteration” was screened on Japanese television and was named by Japan’s public television network as one of that year’s most notable art events.

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, drawing on this massive pool of work organizes the retrospective under six themes, each of which remains a thick thread tracing the entire body of work: Infinity, Accumulation, Radical Connectivity, Biocosmic, Death, and Force of Life.

Infinity

Pondering infinity reduces the scale and seeming severity of all that you’re dealing with. As though the sharp pains of your life, at the scale of the entire universe are simply gone. Yayoi’s Infinity Nets of dots at an incredible scale is an invitation into a trance.

The artist was reportedly inspired by her experience viewing the Pacific Ocean from the plane on her journey to the United States. She covered huge canvases with brushstrokes that loop seemingly endlessly.

Accumulation

This section of work doesn’t seem to have pierced the mass consciousness in the same way Yayoi’s Infinity Nets, polka dots, and sculptures have. Owe that to the darkness of the humor or the sexual themes permeating the work. This theme houses the first sculptures created by the artist which she created by attaching phallic sacs to furniture and painted macaroni to shoes.

Yayoi described the process of making these as therapeutic. They allowed her to address her professed aversion to sex and her anxiety around industrial food production. It’s as though she’s making fun of the things she’s bothered by and afraid of. 

In this section, Yayoi also makes extensive use of mass-produced objects – postage stamps, for example – having described herself as “under the spell of accumulation.” These repetitive, labor-intensive works led the artist to hospitalization on several occasions, with Yayoi needing treatment for mental and physical exhaustion.

Radical Connectivity

Coming from the previous section, there seems to be a yearning from the artist to bring humanity back to how it’s “supposed to function.” And while that’d be a whole debate on its own, a movement away from complete industrialization and accumulating objects for the sake of it sounds appropriate. So, too, a movement toward our natural state of connection with the earth as well as each other. 

This section houses the happenings of self-obliteration cited earlier. Note that many of these events occurred during the US war in Vietnam—and these works functioned as protests. These nude protests further asserted equality and the liberation of human bodies, definitely relevant within the boundaries of the civil rights and gay rights movements.

Biocosmic

The artist possesses an entire philosophy to life that comes through as a common thread in her work. This is Yayoi’s mystic philosophy of the universe which has it that all things share an underlying order. 

In the 1960s, she described her polka dots as a metaphor. For the sun, moon, and earth—as well as all individuals within the interlacing web of creation. The Pumpkin works, as well as the artist’s earlier watercolor and pastel pieces, fit within this segment.

Death

Aside from poking fun at the things which frighten her, Yayoi soberly wrestles with depression in some of her works, processing a fascination with death. Some of her earlier work addresses her memories as a teenager during the Second World War.

After moving back to Japan from the United States, having struggled for a decade trying to gain recognition as a female artist, Yayoi explores not just death but hope for spiritual renewal after life—perhaps as exemplified in works like “Death of Nerves.” In these works, death finds itself not at the end of a story but part of a unified whole that is the universe. It’s part of a never-ending loop—one of continual rebirth and renewal.

Force of Life

Yayoi’s work tends toward taking stock of the maladies plaguing humankind—war, suppression, industrialization, environmental degradation, depression. In the works, Yayoi tussles with their presence, trying to draw on sources of hope. Hope that the underlying force permeating all things will overcome the present suffering.

This final theme of art contains Yayoi’s commitment to “creating art for the healing of humankind.” The art in this section takes a departure from the darker tones in the last one. The artist uses bright colors and acrylics to depict the lighter side of our being interconnected.

Dissociating from What Harms Us

Rick Rubin, the nine-time Grammy-winning producer, writes in his new book: “We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting. The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment.”

Over an astonishing multi-decade career Yayoi has only sharpened her sense of our collective behaviour causing us harm, tearing us further apart from our natural way of interacting with our reality. As an unending news cycle continues to grip at our attention, Yayoi presents us with tools for hope.

By flooring us, reminding us of our being tiny in the deep eyes of the infinite. By presenting objects and nets of such massive scale as well as immersive experiences, she’s inviting us to be present to our own roles in the world—as stewards rather than masters. As participants rather than creators. As creative and linked beings rather than individuals.

Clearly, the world moves in cycles—economic ones, social upheavals. Yayoi has found a way to be at the cusp of each one of them—from wars, to rights movements, and now mental health advocacy. It seems only fitting in a world finding something new to bite its nails over on a daily basis that art guiding us back to our connected states permeates social consciousness. 

And with both timeless themes and an iconic study on patterns, the works of Yayoi Kusama will remain—continuing their goal of healing us and gently nudging us away from what’s causing us harm.