The 95-year-old is now one of the most popular artists in the world, for her cheeky pumpkins and infinity rooms – but it is her fascinating early works that make this NGV exhibition great
As a small girl, Yayoi Kusama would wander down to the flower fields owned by her wealthy family in Matsumoto, and daydream “among beds of violets” with her sketchbook. One day, suddenly, she saw faces on the flowers. “To my astonishment they were talking to me,” she wrote decades later in her autobiography. “The voices quickly grew in number and volume, until the sound of them hurt my ears. I had thought that only humans could speak, so I was surprised the violets were using words. I was so terrified my legs began shaking.”
This was no child’s fantasy but a genuinely disturbing hallucination, and the first of what she would call “depersonalisations” that would haunt her for decades to come. Since the 1970s Kusama has lived voluntarily in an Tokyo institution; she walks from there to her studio each day, where she obsessively makes art using the same symbols that fascinated her as a child (flowers, polka dots, pumpkins) to explore her fears (sex, war, oblivion). “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art,” she once said.
