KUSAMA Princess of Polka Dots MUSEUM VIDEO.mov. Yayoi Kusama: The Polka-Dot-Loving Art Legend I Initially Mistook for Crazy. A documentary in the works looks to capture the incredible career of an 83-year-old Japanese eccentric. Yayoi Kusama, known for her innovative soft-sculpture, immersive, polka-dotted experiences, is among Japan's most revered living artists. With art that strides the abstract, cute, and bizarre, this 83-year-, orange-wigged living doll is the consummate avant gardist. She exists in a self-contained bubble of spacy illusions and ephemeral visions, and for the past 38 years has lived voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital across the street from her painting studio. Frequent exhibitions at MoMA and the Whitney, prestigious gallery shows, mountains of published monographs, and scores of fashion products bearing her imprimatur attest to her surprising popularity.
Last February, the Tate Modern in London opened a major retrospective, now in its final month, that testifies to her colossal art-world appeal. I came to know Kusama in 1968. But to me, then, she was simply a kook. Yayoi Kusama Timeline. Yayoi Kusama Official Site. Yayoi Kusama’s Return to the Art World. Yayoi Kusama is 83 and back in New York, where she first moved in 1958, from provincial Japan by way of Seattle, in a quest to become the most famous possible version of herself. She succeeded for a while. Within a decade, she’d turned herself into a kind of avant-garde hippie shaman and tabloid fixture, known for painting polka dots on naked people. But the cost was high: In the early seventies, broke and broken, she moved home and into a Tokyo mental hospital, her reputation in New York evaporating without her here to cultivate it.
By 1996, it was possible for a Paula Cooper Gallery intern to find one of Kusama’s chair-sculptures, which are covered in phallic carbuncles, in a junk shop on East 11th Street. He bought it for just $250. He’d heard about Kusama because that was around the time she was being rediscovered—Cooper had just opened a show of her work—by a generation of curators inspired by idiosyncratic artists who’d ended up in art history’s dusty attic. Yayoi Kusama. Goodbye Kusama. Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama pour Louis Vuitton | Mode.