Creative Wisdom from Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama has spent nearly her entire 70-plus year creative career painting dots. Photo courtesy of the Yayoi Kusama Museum.
Artist Yayoi Kusama has covered seemingly every imaginable (and even unimaginable) surface in dots and isn’t sorry. Big dots. Little dots. Polka dots. Pumpkin dots. Butterfly dots. Dots on Veuve Clicquot Champagne bottles, Japanese, trees, and in groovy new immersive art installations.
Kusama, 95, is one of the most famous living female artists in the world, and her works can sell for between $5 million and $10 million at auction. But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Kusama during her career. She has wrestled with mental illness throughout her career and, since the 1970s, has lived voluntarily in an Tokyo institution. From there she walks to her studio each day, to obsessively makes art to explore her fears (sex, war, oblivion).
Here is some of her best creative wisdom on the intersection of creativity and mental health, pain, risk, and obsession.
This artwork “Flowers” sold for $10 million at auction. Image c/o Yusama.
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1. “All of my works are steps on my journey, a struggle for truth that I have waged with pen, canvas, and materials.”
2. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.”
Kusama brings people into new worlds, like this one called “Infinity Mirrors” that was on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. Image c/o Kusama.
This installation, “Gleaming Lights of the Souls,” is covered in mirrors and is on display at the Louisiana Museum. Image c/o Louisiana Museum.
3. “I was under the spell of polka dots. Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse, bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all wtih a single polka dot. That was the way I saw it, and I had no ears to listen. I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.”
4. “From the point of view of one who creates, everything is a gamble, a leap into the unknown… I was being drawn toward a mountain peak that had never been mapped or climbed. If the true shape of this peak would have been knowable, my life would have turned to grey. Each day I learned anew what an inscrutable, ambition-filled human struggle it is to paint, to create.”
This is what happens when Kusama’s polka dots and fine Champagne meet.
5. “I am an obsessional artist. People call me crazy, but I am not crazy. My vision is clear in my madness.”
6. “Create, then obliterate.”
7. “Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.”
8. “Because New York was the sort of place it was, there were also many artists with true backbone – robust people who could not be broken. And these artists were doing good work.”
9. “I read the art reviews of my work. Some critics understand my art correctly, while some dont’. I simply ignore the reviews written by the latter.”
10. “What I think about first and foremost is that I want to create good art. That is my sole desire. It would be futile and meaningless to focus on the shrinking time-frame before me, or to think of my limitations. I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death. There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart is bursting with the aspiration to make art that will last forever.
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