Listen to
Mika Yoshitake:
The work before you now is titled Atomic Bomb. Kusama painted it in 1954. Resembling a typographical map, the scene features dozens of black, swirling lines sitting atop two swathes of red ink, one swathe bigger than the other.
Kusama was sixteen in 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, mostly civilians. Kusama has returned to themes related to war and its horrors throughout her lengthy career.
These paintings might remind us that processing certain events we’ve lived through can be a lifelong undertaking. This may be especially true of traumatic events. We might revisit particularly difficult scenes at different moments in our lives. Time allows us to view new layers and perspectives within them.
Narrator:
Atomic Bomb is a work on paper with gouache, ink, and pastel made by Yayoi Kusama in 1954. The work is 25 centimetres high and 17.6 centimetres wide. When framed, the overall dimensions of the piece are 47 centimetres high, around 40 centimetres wide, and 5 centimetres deep. At first glance, the work seems to depict a gigantic worm-like creature erupting from the bottom amidst billowing white fumes. An irregular black border frames the viewer’s perspective.
The worm-like creature is red in colour with layers of black curls and jagged edges along its body, which occupies four-fifths of the length of the paper. A black core sits at the top of the composition from which long, wavy black lines emanate. Behind, the worm-like creature bends to the left as if to devour the dark red sphere beside it. This sphere has the appearance of a cellular organism: its body is covered by black curls while fine black lines extend outwards like hair. To the left of these shapes, around twenty short horizontal black lines descend towards the bottom. Each line has four or five black dots like a string of black beads.
The background of the piece is mostly in purple and white and resembles a sky. Hints of yellow, orange, purple-red, and violet-blue in the distance suggest sparks of fire from an explosion. Black jagged borders surround the top and both lengths of the piece, presenting a cave-like field of vision, while a striped black border frames the bottom edge. Portrayed as a gentle slope of fine vertical hatches, the striped border falls gently to the left towards Kusama’s signature, written in small red print in the lower left corner. Her inscription reads ‘1954 YAYOI KUSAMA’.