The first time I had ever seen – or even heard of – the work of Yayoi Kusama was back in 2006, when she wrapped up trees along Singapore’s main shopping street, Orchard Road, with her trademark red and white dots, as part of the Singapore Biennale. I was only 10. Okay, I remember thinking, that’s cool. Not sure what’s happening, but that’s cool. But this was way before I knew anything about her, and still at the age when the only sort of art I was really exposed to was classically beautiful paintings.
The next time I saw Kusama’s work was through the windowpanes of a Louis Vuitton store in 2012, when she covered the storefront with red tentacle-like structures, all decked out, once again, in neat rows of white dots. By this time, I had learnt her name and knew, through my mom, that she was a famous artist. “Apparently she sees all these dots and works them into her art,” my mother had told me. “I don’t quite get it, but I guess it’s kind of quirky, like something out of Alice in Wonderland.”
Years passed. I never really thought of Kusama, and her name never showed up in any of my History of Art readings. It was in 2016 when I first encountered the Japanese artist’s works again, in the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. I had seen a photograph of a friend in one of her Infinity Rooms (on Instagram, of course), and thought it would be cool to go and check it out in real life. By this time, I was much more open-minded towards artworks I hadn’t really been fond of, such as installation art and sculpture, and decided that I was game to wait over an hour to view works such as her Narcissus Garden, and All the Eternal Love I have for Pumpkins. Like many others, I swiftly became besotted with her works and the otherworldly, ethereal spaces she had crafted. On top of that, I fiercely admired how Kusama took inspiration from her mental illness and hallucinations, and found ways to turn these experiences into something so breath-taking.
This year, I was lucky enough to return home to Singapore in time for Yayoi Kusama’s most recent exhibition, ‘Life is the heart of a Rainbow’, at the National Gallery Singapore, which showcases more than 120 pieces of her artworks. Spanning painting, sculpture, video, and installations, visitors are able to engage with Kusama’s earliest artworks from the 1950s as well as her more recent pieces, such as her never-before-seen soft sculptures and paintings from her series My Eternal Soul, which Kusama has been working on since 2009.
‘Life is the Heart of a Rainbow’ begins with Kusama’s intricate Net Paintings, which were first produced in the 50s, and brought Kusama to fame in New York when she moved to the United States in 1957. Polka dots flood the canvases of each Infinity Net painting; they were a direct projection of the hallucinations Kusama had been experiencing since the tender age of 10 and are what she is most renowned for today. Monochromatic in colour, bafflingly detailed and wildly enchanting, I found myself at each painting for a couple of minutes, immersing myself in those fields of dots and trying, for just a moment, to understand how Kusama lived the way she did.
'Pumpkin' (1981)
Up until then, I had no real clue about Kusama’s works beyond her mustard-yellow pumpkins and her gleaming infinity rooms. I had an idea of her personal history of mental health, but my visit allowed me to learn more about how her familial upbringing and life in Japan during the Second World War affected her practise. With one of the works from Kusama’s My Eternal Soul collection being a small field of soft, silver phallic-shaped sculptures, it became apparent that sex, and later I learnt, a fear of sex, was a prominent theme in her works. Kusama’s fear of sex was deep-rooted, and stemmed from her childhood; her womanising father would frequently bring home other women and her mother would make her spy on them. Upon learning that, I instantly recoiled in disgust, and yet I was, in an odd way, impressed; it seemed that Kusama had found the perfect medium and form of presentation to convey her overwhelming trauma, and fear and disgust of sex.
Infinity Mirrored Room – 'Gleaming Lights of the Souls' (2008)
Stepping into the Infinity Room, Gleaming Lights of the Souls was really nothing short of captivating: I was bombarded by flashing, sunset-hued hanging lights reflected in the mirrored interiors of the enclosed cube and reflective floor. Suddenly I was everywhere amidst these lights, and for a moment I had almost lost sight of myself; in this new realm there were infinite reflections of myself, and it truly seemed like I had stepped into an ethereal dreamscape. While a visit to the Infinity Room was an unforgettable aesthetic experience (and a great solid opportunity, might I say), the patterns formed by both the glittering lights and the audience are meant to parallel the universe’s perennial cycles of life and death. With each visit to an Infinity Room, I’m always left spellbound: it is not often we are presented with an opportunity to really immerse ourselves within a dazzling new world resembling the mind of such a ground-breaking artist.
This experience was also coupled with Kusama’s video Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, which features the red-haired artist in the same Infinity Room, reciting a song she wrote back in 2010. Now, I had never been drawn into the world of video installations, but it was an understatement to say that Kusama’s words shook me to my very core. Something inside me broke as Kusama stared at me with her dark, piercing eyes as she recited those intense lyrics. In the video, Kusama appears sage-like and almost otherworldly, standing in front of the backdrop of her various Infinity Rooms. With each word, I could feel her suffering, her vulnerability, her controlled madness, and it made me shiver in the light of the video projection.
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Lyrics below:
Swallow antidepressants and it will be gone Tear down the gate of hallucinations Amidst the agony of flowers, the present never ends At the stairs to heaven, my heart expires in their tenderness Calling from the sky, doubtless, transparent in its shades of blue Embraced with the shadow of illusion Cumulonimbi arise Sounds of tears, shed upon eating the colour of cotton rose I become a stone Not in time eternal But in the present that transpires
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Some might just say that Song stems from Kusama’s struggle with her own psychological disturbances, but that seems reductive to me: Kusama’s obsessions with the infinite passage of time, cyclical patterns of the natural world, and existence and self-obliteration run rampant here. Despite knowing all of this, at the end of the video installation, it felt as if some arcane truth had been bestowed upon me but I barely understood its language, so I would forever be left chipping at all the possibilities of what it could mean. Never had a piece of art left me so moved yet so perplexed. Had Kusama been sharing her esoteric world-view, and if so, what was I supposed to take away from it? The lyric ‘tear down the gate of hallucinations’ haunted me across the rest of the exhibition; was my own perception of the world my own hallucination, and was I meant to embrace or overlook it? Whatever the answer may be, I would recommend readers to watch Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, be it in an exhibition or online, to make their own judgments on such an extraordinary work and search for the truth that lies within it.
https://youtu.be/usLGCAHya9M
This exhibition was on display at Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery (National Gallery Singapore) from 9 June 2017 to 3 September 2017.
For more information and image references: https://www.nationalgallery.sg/see-do/programme-detail/500/yayoi-kusama-life-is-the-heart-of-a-rainbow
Stephanie Yeap