The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

VAVOI KUSAMA - IT STARTED FROM HALLUCINATION It started from hallucination. Ever since I reached the age of reason: nature, the universe, people, blood, flowers and various other things have been etched in my vision and hearing and deep into my mind, as strange, frightful and mysterious occurrences. They have captivated my whole life and stayed with it persistently. 1 Yayoi Kusama is acutely sensitive to the world and resolutely brave. Her art resonates between these two states and is driven by both. Breathtakingly prolific, Kusama's contribution to international art spans five decades, over 460 exhibitions, and some 13 books of fiction and poetry. Beginning with an initial solo exhibition in 1952 at her home town of Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama has surged back and forth through various realms of artistic production. Drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, performance, fashion, tabloid publishing, political and cultural activism, film-making, installation, novels, poetry and music have all been embraced. Throughout the length and breadth of her career, the artist's desire to transmute her vision into material form has remained constant. During the early 1950s, Kusama recognised that the visual and aural hallucinations she had experienced since the age of ten were symptomatic of rijin'sho (depersonalisation syndrome). The condition is self-managed through the artist's decision to voluntarily enter aTokyo psychiatric hospital, which has remained her home since 1977, and by her art-making, which she has fervently continued since childhood. Kusama describes her early defining experiences as: Dissolution and accumulation. Proliferation and fragmentation. The feeling of myself obliterating and the reverberation for the invisible universe. What are they? I was often troubled by a thin silk– like greyish-coloured veil that came to envelop me ... The only way to free myself from them was to control myself - by visually reproducing on paper with pencils or paints, or by drawing from memory these 'nondescript' occurrences .. The first of Kusama's 'Infinity net' paintings were white-on– white and were shown in 1959 to appreciative audiences in New York. The artist had moved to New York a year earlier and lived there for the next 16 years. The paintings comprise thousands of diminutive, intersecting circles of paint forming a continuous matrix of dots 'without composition - without beginning, end or centre'. 3 They act as mediations between the veil of the artist's perception and the immensity of an invisible universe; as reverberations or visualisations on the sound of this encounter between the personal and the infinite, forming a way for the artist to reconcile her experienced hallucinatory world with the physical world around her. 58 APT2002 The artist photographed in 1939 Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo The making of 'Infinity net' paintings has continued throughout Kusama's career. Infinity nets 2000 (Queensland Art Gallery Collection) is testimony to this continuous thread of practice. Such works resist analysis; they reference the infinite, yet the artist rejects readings within Zen Buddhist or Christian frameworks as she is more concerned with perception than doctrine. During the 1960s, the 'Infinity net' paintings were presented in dialogue with monochrome works by artists such as Mark Rothko, Donald Judd and Lucio Fontana, yet Kusama's motivations were entirely different, generated more by a private sensibility than the shared artistic language of any art movement. Her practice is grounded in a repetitive, obsessive manner of working . Kusama works meticulously, often underdrawing in pencil and completing small zones of painting that eventually encompass the entire canvas. 'Her art - even her painting - was always fundamentally performatory, with the process overshadowing the product, and the artist subsuming the art.' 4 By the early 1960s, Kusama's nets and obsessive mark-making spilled off the canvas into sculptural and environmental works that became known as 'accumulations', 'repetitions', 'compulsion furniture', 'aggregations' and 'obsessions'. Her own body was soon enlisted as part of her work. Collages and theatrical photographs from the 1960s depict the artist embedded in unexpected tableaus that literally overflow with the disparate materials of her art, which include screenprints, macaroni, mannequins and fabric sculptures. Yayoi Kusama Japan b.1929 Kusama with 'Love Forever' buttons, which she distributed at the opening of Kusama's peep show: endless love show, a mirror-lined environmental installation at Castellane Gallery NewYork, 1966 Gelatin silver photograph Collection: The artist Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo Photograph: Hal Reiff