In Kusama’s own world,
she, from a very early age, had strong
visual experiences,
I suppose possibly symptoms
of psychological distress and anxiety,
the kind of feeling one
might have from a kind of panic disorder
where her vision is
kind of crowded with dots or blurred.
And all her life,
Kusama has been striving
through different
works of art to create
a kind of similar sensation
in you, the viewer.
Yayoi
Kusama is one of the most famous artists
in the world today, and
Tate Modern did a major
show of her work in 2012, which explored
her long, fascinating career.
And this is just an opportunity
to return to her work
through the lens of her
great Infinity Mirror rooms
and give another generation of audiences
a chance to encounter her work, possibly
for the first time in the flesh.
We wanted to open the
exhibition with some context
about who Kusama is and a little insight
into the life she's led to this point.
Kusama, who is an artist now in her 90s,
was born into war period in Japan.
And the first images really convey
that kind of middle
class, the relatively wealthy
upbringing that she was born into,
but also the very conservative values.
She always railed
against the expectations of her family.
I think there was a degree
to which they expected her
to become a homemaker, to be
pretty subservient.
So Kusama declared her ambitions
to be an artist, to be a creative
at a very young age,
and her family were
very openly against this.
And there's a story
in which Kusama describes
her family sending her
to a type of finishing school
where she is expected
to cultivate manners.
And actually,
she went to study arts instead.
So I think that already gives us
a sense of how rebellious, how defiant
of her family's expectations Kusama was.
The display then traces her
departure from Japan fired by ambition
and the need to cut free
from this very restrictive
conservative milieu.
Images show how she hit the ground
running in New York.
First, as a painter
of considerable ambition,
these huge white net paintings,
and then really within months
and a very few years,
radicalising her practice
as a performance artist,
a maker of installations,
a maker of sculpture,
and then her eventual return to Japan
and the absence of
work she had a breakdown. She
withdrew from the world.
But then she began
to engage once again in the 80s and 90s
and then really quite swiftly
against this extraordinary
global reputation.
And the penultimate photograph,
which is one of my
She withdrew from the world. But then she began to engage once again
in the 80s and 90s and then really quite swiftly
against this extraordinary global reputation.
And the penultimate photograph, which is one of my favourites of Kusama
raising her fists in front of a group of her recent
paintings in the final room of her 2012
retrospective at Tate Modern.
So the first work of art
that you encounter
is the universal scene
from the Stairway to Heaven,
Kusum has great titles
and it's one of her peep show works,
and she's been making
versions of this work since the 1960s.
It's a mirror at work.
And the idea is you
look through one
of the circular apertures
and you get a sense of a
kind of immersion in Kusama's own world.
We really like the idea that
even though we're showing these large
Infinity Mirror installations,
actually, this is a concept
that Kusama has deployed
on a much smaller scale.
But looking inside, you wouldn't
necessarily know that
because the space
just seems to go on forever.
So we opened the door
on a very dark space.
We seem to be looking at
dozens, maybe hundreds,
thousands of twinkling lights
at kind of head height.
And then as we move into the space,
we look down into sort of deep,
infinite space.
It's a really strange
feeling of vertigo
looking down, down, down.
But then you look up
and you look again into infinite space.
Sort of feels like corridors of blackness
taking you to goodness knows where.
And so very kind of
out of body experience.
And then suddenly
you plunged into darkness at first.
So the cases were Kusama at the instore.
So they were brought up
to the gallery spaces
ready for the install.
And that's the first time
I saw them in real life.
So you kind of have pieces of the puzzle
and slowly as you're installing it,
you're kind of putting it all together
and understanding
how it how it all fits together.
The way they've designed it is so clever
how everything is so together so neatly.
The process of putting the chandelier
in had to be very carefully considered.
Four of the glass panels
were put in before
the chandelier is
put into the centre of the chamber.
And so it had to be done very carefully
to manage that and make sure that was
there was no damage.
That was definitely the
the tensest point of install.
Walking Peace is
a slide projection that presents
documentary photographs of Kusama
walking alone in the streets
of New York City.
She is dressed in kimono
and she is carrying a parasol
that has appliqué to it.
These artificial flowers.
And it's quite an extraordinary sight.
And it's been said
that this performance
expressed Kusama feelings of alienation,
not least of being in a big city,
but also being a woman artist of Japanese
descent in an art world
that was mainly dominated by white men.
In the 1960s, in the postwar period
in which the United States
and Japan had been
on opposing sides in the war,
I think that the propaganda
and the messaging from governments
had a very, very real
and material effects upon people.
I think Kusama certainly
experienced this.
Strangely enough, this seems to echo
a moment of discrimination
in the United States.
It has been widely reported about
attacks on people of East Asian descent.
In today's news media.
So I think that this week
is a very stark reminder
of how history does
seem to repeat itself.
She's really trying to replicate
or translate as closely as possible
experiences that
have been very profound to her,
and she wants them
to be very profound to you.
She's always put herself at center stage,
and this is a work
in which she wants you
to be centre stage.
It's beautifully made.
But again, it's a very simple technology
that little LED lights
and they're connected
via circuitry that creates
infinitely changing sequence of lights.
The room is very dark and
there is a walkway on the floor,
but either side of the walkway
there is just a thin layer of water.
So it creates this strange
shimmering feeling.
Were taken from your sense of security
to a slight sense of anxiety?
And what is very powerful about this work
is that you really do
feel part of it, infinite,
never ending, boundless
experience of colour and light.
And it's very easy
to loose your connectivity
with the meeting
you were just at or the people you're
with, you're plunged
into the kind of epicentre
of her universe.
We were really keen
not to pathologise Kusama
as experience of mental illness,
and to this end, we really scrutinised
be the extended captions
around the artworks.
Any mention of mental health
we thought about very carefully.
And we were also
incredibly lucky
to have had the consultation
support of Rethink Mental Illness,
which is a mental health
charity in the UK.
So in this way,
we hope that we are communicating
a set of experiences and issues
around mental health
appropriately in this exhibition.
You have to know she arrived
in New York at the end of 1950s
and she was there for that decade
where art became radical.
She
she was a friend of
Warhol, of Oldenburg's, Donald Judd.
She went from being a painter
to being a performance artist.
She went from being interested in
literature to being
interested in politics.
She was part of kind of the sex,
drugs and rock and roll era.
She went from, you know,
painting canvases
to painting bodies,
from designing clothes
to taking them off.
And the Mirror Rooms in in the
at that time featured
almost as a stage set.
She hired photographers,
she documented every aspect of her career
from her teenage years
through to her 90s.
And this is an extraordinary
selection of photographs
showing how Kusama collaborated
with photographers
of her generation
here, notably Harry
Shunk and János Kender
and the renowned Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe.
Now, this is a short archival film
made by John Jones,
who is an artist, filmmaker and lecturer
who documented dozens of artist studios
in New York in the 1960s.
And it gives a fascinating insight
into her working
life as she poses.
It's not a studio visit.
It's a record of performative actions
in her studio with her works.
If the works themselves
become props and Christmas
and fictionalisation of her life.
She is very funny.
But you see the interest,
the engagement with
sex, sexual liberation, her obsession
with penises, her obsession with food.
And these were part of her
kind of psychological drama.
And yet she is able
to make them very funny
and create space for you.
I think Kusama had a lot of
real pleasure and deep engagement,
but it was a very, very tough time.
And it took its toll.
She was very much on her own.
She was derided as an Asian woman
and artist of colour
in a very white male world.
I mean, she was indomitable,
but it can't have been easy.
And I think one of the reasons
that her work became more radical
was that she found her more
conventional work, was not accepted
in the way it would have been
had she been a male artist.
So it was in kind of defiance of that,
that her work got more and more radical
and then she gained
this reputation for notoriety.
I mean, she was undoubtedly a pioneer
when you think about the way
younger artists now
routinely work in a number
of different mediums at the same time.
It was very, very
unusual in the 60s
for an artist to have a studio practice
and work as a performance artist.
And Kusama did everything.
She defied the barriers between media.
The boundaries between
public and private,
between commerce and the studio.
She was her own dealer.
She was her own publicist.
You know,
she performed all those roles
and possibly of necessity,
but also because she was
unbelievably ambitious
right from the start.
You know, talk about,
you know, achieving against the odds.