Yayoi Kusama has created an estimated 50,000 works during a career spanning half a century, is feted in her native Japan and in the US - yet in Britain she remains relatively unknown. Kusama turned 80 in March, but when we meet at her Tokyo studio, she is a vision in a bobbed, blood-red wig and a red one-piece dress covered in her beloved polka dots.
It is impossible to discuss Kusama's work without making mention of those dots and the omnipresent lined meshed patterns she calls "infinity nets". They appeared in her early paintings, on "living" installations comprising her own naked torso and those of her friends, and, more recently, wrapped around tree trunks in Singapore. Later this month, trees along the Thames will also be given the polka-dot treatment, as part of a collaborative exhibition with nine other artists at London's Hayward Gallery.
The motifs first came to Kusama in childhood. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in the Japanese Alps, she started seeing a psychiatrist at the age of 10 after she became gripped by visions of dots, nets and violet flowers that covered everything she saw. "I call them my repetitive vision," she says. "I still see them. [They] cover the canvas and grow on to the floor, the ceiling, chairs and tables. Then the polka dots move to the body, on to my clothes and into my spirit. It is an obsession."
Hers was an unhappy childhood. "Not a single day went by that my mother didn't regret giving birth to me," she says. "She was the only daughter of a wealthy family, so my father, as the son-in-law, was able to lead an extravagant lifestyle. He ended up having an affair with a geisha and deserted us to be with her in Tokyo. It damaged my mother. I was stuck in the middle of a long-running feud and I felt mentally cornered. That's why I started hallucinating. I started seeing a psychiatrist, and it was he who first encouraged me to develop as an artist."
She studied, against her mother's wishes, at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, and by 1950 had moved from traditional Japanese painting to abstract natural forms. In her most fevered periods, in her 20s, she was producing dozens of paintings a day, leading to more conflict at home. "My mother was strongly opposed to my becoming an artist. She was from a very old, conservative family. She was a collector of art and desperately wanted me to become one, too. Whenever I drew or made sculptures, she would fly into a rage and throw paints and canvases at me."
Eventually, in 1957, Kusama left Japan for New York, following a lengthy correspondence with the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. "I had been a great admirer after coming across her work in an old book I found in a store in my home town. Her works are wonderful, moving. I spent six hours travelling to Tokyo so I could find her address in Who's Who at the US embassy. Amazingly, she wrote back, and we kept writing to each other."
In America, Kusama's installations caught the eye of critics and collectors. Her Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show - a real rowing boat encrusted with phallic protuberances - caused a sensation when it appeared at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York in 1963. "That kind of exhibition was extremely avant garde at the time," she says. "Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism were the big thing then. But they all came to see me and asked me why I did what I did. I said I just do Kusama art." Andy Warhol, she says, asked her permission to use the patterns in his silk screens. She refused. "People were queueing in the streets, waiting to see a Kusama original," she says. "After my mirror room show, other artists like Claes Oldenburg started making soft sculptures. So many artists have been influenced by my art and repeat my vision."
But Kusama's mental health deteriorated to such an extent that, in 1973, she returned home for treatment. In 1975 she checked herself into the psychiatric hospital she still calls home, finding that the routine gave her the order she needed to concentrate on her work. She slowly crept back into the public consciousness, and in 2006 she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's most prestigious arts prizes.
Kusama has often said that if it weren't for art, she would have killed herself long ago. "I only slept two hours last night. When I get tired from making pictures, I find it really difficult to go to sleep. But it's how I get away from my illness and escape the hallucinations. I call it psychosomatic art." So why does her work seem more like a celebration of life's euphoric moments? "I don't really think about what my emotions are. I don't plan to make them nice and cheerful, but once I start, they just move in that direction. My hands start moving before I can think anything."
Kusama will be happy if the new exhibition "brings people around to the idea of the infinity of the cosmos and the beauty of life. Nothing I do stays in the gallery space. Everything I do is a walk in my mind. There are no limits." It seems almost inappropriate to ask if she ever considers retiring. "No. As long as I have the energy, I will carry on. I'd like to live 200 or 300 years. I want to leave my message to my successors and future generations."
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