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Exterior of the Yayoi Kusama Museum. Photo by Masahiro Tsuchido. Courtesy the Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo.
It has been a busy year for Yayoi Kusama, the energetic 88-year-old grande dame of the Japanese art scene who has a penchant for dots and pumpkins. The traveling Infinity Mirrors, after opening at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in February, went on to stop at the Seattle Art Museum, The Broad in Los Angeles, and will continue its tour well into 2018. “My Eternal Soul” was mounted at The National Art Center, Tokyo, where the artist made an appearance for photo ops and even gave a speech (read from a dot covered binder). “Life Is the Heart of a Rainbow” opened at the National Gallery Singapore this summer, and then toured to the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The Dallas Museum of Art is currently exhibiting “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins.” And then there were countless solo and group presentations in commercial galleries and art fairs worldwide. But the crowning achievement for Kusama was the opening of a museum bearing her name, which she calls “the greatest inspiration of my entire life” in a public letter titled “A Message of Love for My Beloved Humankind.”
The Yayoi Kusama Museum, under the directorship of poet and art critic Akira Tatehata, opened to the public on October 1, 2017, in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Built by Japanese architecture firm Kume Sekkei, the narrow, curved, all-white structure spans 5 storeys, each with it’s own draw for visitors seeking up-close looks at the massive catalog of work that Kusama has created over her decades-long career.
The museum’s current popularity is to be expected. As of press time, tickets are sold out until February 2018, with a new batch scheduled to be available to the public on December 1. While sketching is permitted (only pencils and dry media are allowed in the exhibition areas), Kusamaphiles are barred from bringing selfie sticks into the museum.
For those who haven’t managed to snap up a golden ticket, here’s what the show looks like.
Exterior view of the first floor at the Yayoi Kusama Museum. Courtesy the Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo.
Floor 1
Visitors enter the building via a large, sliding glass door, and then ticketholders see the check-in desk, where staff check for proper identification. Museumgoers are instructed to only take the stairs up, as the elevator is reserved for guests with physical disabilities or who are traveling downward. The first floor also has a small gift shop, offering Kusama cookies, purses, scarves and more.
Floor 2
The first set of stairs leads to a space packed full of 27 works from Kusama’s “Love Forever” series. This series was completed between 2004 and 2007, and includes 50 silkscreens created from original marker drawings. The monochrome black-and-white works—including Waking Up In The Morning (TQSTW) (2007), Flowering New York [OPRT] and Women Waiting For Spring [TZW] (both 2005)—feature whimsical profiles worked into the compositions.
Floor 3
After climbing up to the third floor, we see 16 large-scale acrylic paintings from Kusama’s “My Eternal Soul” series. When she began working on this series in 2009, the artist stated her desire to produce 100 paintings at the rate of one per day. But she didn’t stop when she reached that goal; there are now over 530 canvases in “My Eternal Soul.” Kusama personally selected each work in this gallery, including the new Death Of My Sorrowful Youth Comes Walking With Resounding Steps (2017), Prayers For Peace (2015) and I Love Eyes (2013). This floor also has floor-to-ceiling windows, offering a view of bustle in Shinjuku, where the artist also has her studio.
YAYOI KUSAMA, Pumpkins Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity, 2017, mixed media, variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist and Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo.
Floor 4
A single door on the fourth floor landing conceals the latest from one of the artist’s crowd-pleasers: a new mirror room titled Pumpkins Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity, in which a polka dot pumpkin patch flickers in darkness. Kusama’s first mirror room, Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field, was created in 1965, and the artist notes her family’s ownership of a seed nursery business as the root of her interest in the natural world.
Installation view of fifth floor rooftop gallery of the Yayoi Kusama Museum. Courtesy the Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo.
Floor 5
The top floor includes a small library of books documenting the artist’s career through museum exhibitions and gallery shows. Included is the monograph Yayoi Kusama: I Like Myself (Infas, Tokyo), Yayoi Kusama: Give Me Love from David Zwirner Books, as well as others offered in English and Japanese. The last stop at the museum is the open-air rooftop, which features a new sculpture, Starry Pumpkin—a nod to the artist’s obsession with the plant’s “charming and winsome form.” The elevator is a few steps away.
Peter Augustus Owen is the Tokyo-based associate publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.
Yayoi Kusama’s “Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art” is on view at the Yayoi Kusama Museum until February 25, 2017.
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