Princess of Polka Dots, Yayoi Kusama

Many already know the work of Yayoi Kusama without knowing about the artist… Her influential Pop Art in the sixties has spilt over into fashion, installation, and performance. Now in her 90s, Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s most famous artists. Yet she needed to work with unerring dedication and ambition to achieve the world fame she now enjoys. As a child, she showed great talent as an artist, but her middle-class parents made clear this was an unsuitable career for a girl. Her family ran a flower nursery in rural Japan and, while drawing in a field of flowers, she experienced an intense visual sensation. It was as though the flowers turned into a myriad of coloured dots that overwhelmed her senses yet liberated her consciousness. These sensations and her unique perspective, combined in an experience she offers us in many of her, now famous, Infinity Room installations. The first ‘peep show’ infinity rooms were developed in the sixties, while she was establishing her reputation as an international artist in New York. When studying and working in Japan, learning traditional Japanese painting techniques, she had written to the American artist <a href="https://medium.com/signifier/mother-of-the-american-modern-fb9168941339" rel="noopener">Georgia O’Keefe</a>, enclosing some of her watercolours. O’Keefe wrote back with an encouraging response. This inspired Yayoi Kusama, then aged 27, to take action, packing her suitcase with over 2,000 paintings and travelling to the USA. There, she met O’Keefe and other famous artists such as Andy Warhol and plunged into the vibrant avant-garde New York art scene of the late 1950s.  <a href="https://medium.com/signifier/princess-of-polka-dots-yayoi-kusama-2ba22620bd56">Click Here</a>