Listen to
Doryun Chong:
Let your eyes roam between the rectangular frames that make up this giant installation, titled Shooting Stars. Kusama filled each of the eighty-four frames with hand-sewn fabric sacs that extend in all directions, taking over this orderly grid structure as if they are wild parasitic vines. The silvery entangling forms also resemble synapses of the nervous system and evoke a flow of electric currents. The assemblage alludes to an expanding universe; or, it can represent something as small as cells and as big as the stars in the sky.
After returning to Japan from New York in 1973, Kusama focused on coping with psychological distress and deteriorating mental health. In the 1980s, she cemented her position as a leading avant-garde artist in Japan and received increasing attention from the international art world. She created this work in 1992, one year before she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, the most important recurring global exhibition of contemporary art. The installation seems to radiate energy, symbolising her ambition and explosive creativity.
Narrator:
Shooting Stars is an installation created by Yayoi Kusama in 1992. The work is 320 centimetres high, 840 centimetres wide, and 30 centimetres deep. A total of eighty-four rectangular compartments are aligned in a grid of four rows and twenty-one columns. The entire structure is silvery-white. From a distance, the work looks like a lattice fence framing hundreds of roots that reflect surrounding lights and shadows.
Each compartment is 80 centimetres high, 40 centimetres wide, and 30 centimetres deep. Within each frame are soft, interweaving tendrils that are silver in colour and resemble tangled roots or nerves. The tendrils are smooth and shiny. They are filled with stuffing material and vary in thickness, ranging from the width of an adult’s palm to an adult’s finger. Between the tendrils are gaps through which one can see the other side.