LIFE in COLOUR

The world's most successful living artist, Yayoi Kusama, will have eight decades of art on display in a blockbuster Australian exhibition.

- Saskia Tillers Coles

For 85 years, Yayoi Kusama has been plagued by polka dots. Over her lifetime, she’s made hundreds, thousands, millions – now surely billions – of them since they first appeared to her in a vision when she was a 10-year-old living in Matsumoto City in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture.

The fixation began with hallucinations; the endlessness of the dots represented infinity, she has said. Turning them into art was a way to expel her obsessive tendencies. Kusama spent her childhood feverishly drawing and painting, despite her conservative parents’ discouragement. When she ran out of art supplies, she would use mud from the nearby river, or raid the family’s plant and seed farm (hence the pumpkin obsession) for canvas sacks to paint on. Clearly, there was no way to stop the impulse, so when Kusama was 20 her parents relented and allowed her to move to Kyoto to study the Japanese modernist Nihonga style of painting at Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts.

In 1959, age 30, she moved to New York and spent the next 14 years exhibiting paintings, sculptures and installations across the United States, firmly securing her place in the male-dominated American and international art scene. Her breakthrough came in 1968, when she organised a series of “Happenings”, in which participants were naked except for the polka dots painted on their bodies, and were situated in her Mirror Rooms (Mirror Performance) or in famous public places around NYC (in the case of The Anatomic Explosion).