To celebrate its first anniversary in November 2022, M+ Museum has organised its first special exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, from 12 November 2022 to 14 May 2023, the largest retrospective of the renowned artist in Asia outside Japan, featuring a wide range of paintings, installations, sculptures, drawings, collages, moving images, and archival materials.
The retrospective highlights the core aesthetic elements of Kusama’s work and foregrounds her recurring philosophical questions about life and death and her longing for interconnectedness. The exhibition explores how Kusama has become a global cultural icon who creates vital and influential work to this day. At 93, the Japanese artist is still painting daily at the psychiatric hospital she voluntarily checked into and has lived in since the 1970s.
To accompany the exhibition, Thames and Hudson has published, in collaboration with M+, the book Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.
Written by Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator at M+, and Mika Yoshitake, independent curator specialising in post-war Japanese art, the monograph is the most comprehensive survey of Yayoi Kusama’s work to date, spanning seven decades and multiple media.
Following the chronological and thematic organisation of the exhibition, from Kusama’s earliest work to her most recent output, the book is structured around six thematic sections, Infinity, Accumulation, The Biocosmic, Radical Connectivity, Death and Force of Life, each of which is intended to elucidate the aesthetic and philosophical concerns at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre.
The retrospective book also features selections from Kusama’s unpublished artist writings, as well as correspondence with American artist Georgia O’Keeffe in 1955, an interview with Japanese critic and curator Yoshie Yoshida, and a roundtable discussion from leading authorities from the Tate Modern in London, Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, Power Station in Shanghai, etc. The book also includes curatorial essays exploring different aspects of Kusama’s practice, and a detailed visual chronology of her life.
Appealing not only to those already familiar with Yayoi Kusama, but also to anyone discovering her for the first time, this monograph is a rare opportunity to dive deeper in Kusama’s intimacy, inspiration and art practice. As explained by Doryun Chong, “Kusama is so much more than pumpkin sculptures and polka-dot patterns. She is a thinker of deep philosophy — a ground-breaking figure who has really revealed so much about herself, her vulnerability (and) her struggles as the source of inspiration for her art.”
Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, by Doryun Chong Mika Yoshitake, published by Thames and Hudson and M+
Hardcover | 347 illustrations | ISBN 9780500025857 | HKD480
Available at M+ bookshop and online store. Also available in Chinese here.
One response to “Book In Focus: Yayoi Kusama, 1945 To Now”
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Great exhibition and great book!