Listen to
Mika Yoshitake:
If you stand back and view this room as a whole, you’ll notice some subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in Kusama’s style and technique. What might stand out most is Kusama’s unquenchable thirst for connectivity and healing.
On one wall you’ll see a mass of paintings that belong to a series titled ‘My Eternal Soul’ created between 2009 and 2021. As you look at these works, you might be able to spot patterns that resemble Infinity Nets. Cast your eyes on the amoeba-like shapes that appear to be undergoing their own form of self-obliteration. In some paintings, shapes, faces, and figures seem to be floating happily in a kind of primordial soup, with familiar cellular forms radiating out of the centre of the compositions.
You might observe that a lot of these paintings are square. Kusama painted the most recent of these works not in a studio but in her hospital room, where she has been living for many years. The canvases are often square-shaped and smaller than some of her previous works.
A lifetime of repeated artistic motions and gestures has formed Kusama’s output, a process that has created an extraordinary ‘body memory’. ‘When I face the canvas, my head is empty’, she has said. ‘As I draw, it rounds out. It spreads in my head’.
It’s inspiring to think, that at 93 years of age, Kusama remains a dynamic force in art, with a body of work that acknowledges the sorrows and joys of life; yet, importantly, continues to inspire audiences with messages of togetherness, and healing in an increasingly fractured world.
Narrator:
More than thirty acrylic paintings in bright colours are displayed on a 27-metre-long white wall. These works are from Yayoi Kusama's My Eternal Soul series. Among these thirty canvases are three paintings: When Love Sprang Between the Two People created in 2018, The Swamp of Rest created in 2016, and The Soul Flies in the Sky created in 2014. They are all square-shaped, 194 centimetres on each side, and exhibit Kusama’s signature elements. These elements include repetitive and dense patterns of eyes and faces, shapes that resemble enlarged cells, mesh patterns, and decentralising compositions.
When Love Sprang Between the Two People has two coloured circles at the centre, one on top of the other with their edges almost touching, against an orange-red background. The top circle is blue and more rounded, while the bottom circle is red and slightly flatter. These two circles occupy half the space of the whole painting.
The circles are surrounded by about 130 thick black lines from all sides, which fill the rest of the canvas. The black lines have what appears to be human eyes on them as well as jagged edges. They crawl towards the centre of the composition from all directions without overlapping each other, but stop short of actually touching the circles. Some of the lines are as long as an adult’s leg, while some are finger-length. Some also branch into multiple lines or develop one or two small stumps, also patterned with eyes.
Pound of Repose features more than sixty different irregular shapes that resemble cells or microorganisms against a bright yellow background. These shapes vary in size and are situated throughout the canvas without overlapping. The larger shapes are around the size of two pieces of A3 paper, while the smaller ones are the size of a coaster. Their edges can be round or jagged.
All of the shapes are unique and exemplify patterns of human faces, eyes, mesh dots, and other objects. To give a few examples, on the left side of the canvas, one cell seems to have encompassed a person’s profile within a black-and-purple cellular wall. Above it, there are two shapes that feature fish: one is round and has multiple fish inside its body, which is supported by short human legs, while the other shape is longer and contains only one fish but also has a pair of legs. One of the shapes at the top of the canvas looks like a white slug with more than thirty human profiles arranged in a row inside it. Several other shapes exhibit smiling human faces; one of them is even wearing a dress.
There are also shapes that do not feature human profiles and are instead filled with mesh patterns, dots, and eyes. Altogether, the canvas is colourful with shapes and patterns depicted in vivid shades of red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, sky-blue, purple, and black. The square canvas is framed by an irregular border that also comes in various colours of pink, red, green, orange, blue, purple, black, and white. Parts of the border echo motifs from the shapes, including jagged edges and dots.
Souls That Flew in the Sky is a work filled with densely painted purple circles on a red background. Eight irregular shapes, which look like cells or microorganisms, are scattered in different locations throughout the canvas. The canvas is framed by a similarly dotted border with black circles on top of light blue paint.
The eight shapes come in various colours and shapes and appear to float in the purple space. They are all patterned with dots. Some shapes are closer to the centre and some are further away. The one at the centre top of the canvas resembles a fingerprint with black dots on top of red. Going clockwise, the object close to the top-right corner is moon-shaped and is painted with orange circles over white. Under it, a long slug shape with red circles over pink sits near the midpoint of the canvas’s right edge, while a gourd shape with sky-blue circles over pale blue is positioned near the centre.
The remaining four shapes are situated on the left side of the canvas. Continuing our clockwise direction, the bottom object looks like a lemon with blue dots outlined in orange. Above it is a triplet of shapes resembling petals that are thicker in the middle and pointed at the ends. Each of the shapes exemplifies a unique colour combination: green circles over red with a black outline, red circles over sky-blue, and white dots over green.