Source 2: We Love Yayoi Kusama

“Polka dots” and are practically synonymous with Yayoi Kusama. Typically, they form a motif representing loveliness, but in Kusama’s work, polka dots express an intense presence that overwhelms the viewer.

For Yayoi Kusama, dots are not a simple motif. Even in a portrait of her mother painted when aged 10, she painted countless dots. Why is Kusama so fascinated with dots, and why does she continue to paint them?

Suffering obsessive-compulsive disorder as a young child, Kusama had hallucinations— violets with human faces that suddenly started talking, dogs barking human words, and the shapes of objects breaking up into dots that filled the room, her body and the entire universe. Ordinarily people—especially young children—would want to block such experiences from their eyes and ears, but Kusama responded by recording the images from these hallucinations with her pen or brush. By attentively observing the hallucination of dots that cover things to the finest detail, she was standing up to her illness. Kusama says, “It was only by continuing to create art that I could recover from that illness.”

Kusama’s family environment had a marked influence on the occurrence of polka dots.

While her daughter was immersed in painting pictures to preserve mental tranquility, Kusama’s mother, born into rural high society and still held to feudalistic thinking, labeled painters as scamps. She refused to give Kusama paints and, on occasion, tore up paintings and threw them away. Kusama’s father, who led a dissipated life, was often away.

It would be easy for a girl living in such an environment to feel her existence negated. In her paintings, by perceiving all physical matter as dot particles, it is like she is seeking to erase her own existence, and all the accompanying anxieties, and liberate her body from the various imprisoning structures that had bound her childhood self.

A master of work that expresses all joy, sorrow and pleasure in life When Kusama explains her own art, she frequently uses the term “self obliteration”.

The aura emitted from things spreads throughout the overall scene to infinity. She herself becomes many polka dots and gets obliterated. Kusama says, “When this happens, inside the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space, oneself and all matter is returned and recovered.” The fundamental concepts of Kusama’s later works, “disorganization and accumulation”, “proliferation and separation” “sense of particle obliteration and resonance from the invisible universe” clearly started from her childhood.

Kusama stated this in her comments regarding the “Infinity Nets” series (see page 78) that was announced in her first solo exhibition in New York.

“For me, through the accumulation of the net’s individual meshes whose negatives are made from every single dot, the infinity of the endless universe was prophesized from my own position and there was a desire to measure it. How infinite is it beyond the universe?

What depths of mystery lie there? Through the perception of this, I want to see my life, which is but one dot. The dot—or rather, the single particle out of a million—is my life.”

Over time, the fear from when she was a girl became her originality of vividly depicting the dots that appear before her eyes moving to and fro between the micro and the macro. “Be it Picasso or Matisse, I’m ready for anything, I will stand up to them with only polka dots.”

She says.

In this way, her dots—representing the joy, sorrow and pleasure of life—become the master in Kusama’s work.