Listen to
Doryun Chong:
Draw your eyes downward onto these shiny metallic blobs of different shapes and sizes. Their fluid forms may remind you of clouds, water drops, and even cells. As you see your reflection repeating and multiplying on the surfaces of these objects, you might experience a moment of losing yourself in the work, as if you were becoming part of it.
During Kusama’s flight to the US from her native Japan in 1957, she saw clouds floating above the Pacific Ocean for the first time. The sight made a deep impression on her, and she has used a variety of media to express the feeling of boundlessness ever since.
Kusama first made a sculpture titled Clouds in 1984. She arranged on the floor an array of blob-like hand-sewn fabric components, all similar in shape and size to the objects in front of you. This version, from 2019, comprises a total of ninety mirrored stainless steel parts. With this new material, Kusama transformed the sense of infinite repetition evoked by her soft sculptures into a kaleidoscopic experience.
As her first attempt to capture a natural phenomenon with stainless steel, this version of Clouds demonstrates how she has innovated continuously throughout her career. Every display of Clouds is one-of-a-kind, just like the ever-changing distribution of clouds in the sky.
Narrator:
Clouds is an installation created by Yayoi Kusama in 2022. The work consists of ninety stainless steel sculptures that are flat and irregularly shaped with mirrored surfaces and rounded edges. They are placed on the floor in clusters close to the windows in a space that is around eighteen metres long and four metres wide. When viewed from a distance, the installation resembles a flock of clouds or splashes of liquid on the ground.
The stainless steel sculptures are not completely flat; instead, they vary in thickness and have a slightly spherical shape like droplets of water as a result of surface tension. The larger sculptures can be more than two metres long and half a metre wide, while the smaller ones are about half a metre long and 20 centimetres wide.
The smooth, mirrored surfaces of the sculptures can reflect the appearances of visitors as they approach the work as well as their surroundings. On a day with good weather, the installation may even reflect sunlight coming from the windows.