Yayoi Kusama - Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

Tate Publishing

Part 1
To New York
My Debut as an Avant-garde Artist
1957 / 1966

Part 2
Before Leaving Home
Awakening as an Artist
1929 / 1957

Part 3
No More War: The Queen of Peace
Avant-garde Performance Art for the People
1967 / 1974

Part 4
People Ive Known, People Ive Loved
Georgia OKeeffe, Joseph Cornell, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and Others

Part 5
Made in Japan
Worldwide Kusamania
1975 / 2002

In Year One of the new millennium, from 2 September to 11 November, the city of Yokohama became the stage for a groundbreaking art festival.

The main venues were the Pacifico Yokohama Exhibition Hall and Red Brick Warehouse No. 1, but the entire city was involved. Exhibitions were held at museums, public halls, and galleries throughout the town, and some hundred and ten artists from thirty-eight countries around the world participated. Y OKOHAMA 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art was Japans first-ever large-scale festival of this sort. And it was to be held every three years from then on.

Since the 1960s, when I was based in New York, I have exhibited my work all over the world, circling the globe many times. And I have always wondered why Japan lags so far behind. Japan has the money and the facilities but no real interest in or understanding of contemporary art. I was shocked, when I first returned from the USA, to find that my country seemed a good hundred years behind the times.

Subsequently, whenever I have returned from a trip abroad, it has felt as though it is to a new Japan. But were still behind the times, even today. There is so much room for improvement in every facet of the art world and the museum system here. During the years of Japans economic bubble in the late 1980s, for example, money was wasted on all sorts of frivolities while art museums across the country were struggling for funds. Such foolishness is never seen in America, even during the leanest of times. Americans and Europeans have a more deeply rooted understanding of the importance of the arts. In Japan, art is thought of only as an amusing pastime, if not an extravagance. This creates an environment that suppresses any real progress and gives rise to a purely superficial view of the arts.

But now, in 2001, the country was lending its support to a huge international exhibition of contemporary arta happy development indeed. The main theme of the exhibition was M EGA W AVE Towards a New Synthesis. All conceivable genres of contemporary art were being brought together painting, sculpture, photography, film, installation. The dream was to create a tsunami of art capable of swallowing the entire world. How wonderful it would be for Yokohama, Japan to be the epicentre of such a mega-wave!

I presented both indoor and outdoor installations at this our historic first Triennale. My indoor installation was called Endless Narcissus Show. Inside the Pacifico Yokohama Exhibition Hall I constructed a mirror room. Ten enormous mirrors lined the interior surfaces of the room, and suspended from the ceiling and covering the floor were some fifteen hundred metallic mirror balls. Walking into the room, viewers found themselves reflected in the countless surfaces and transforming endlessly as they moved. This was an immersion experience in Repetitive Vision.

The outdoor installation was titled Narcissus Sea. I floated two thousand mirror balls, each exactly 30cm in diameter, in the canal alongside the train tracks in the New Port district. As I installed the work, each ball met the water with a joyful sploosh! I found it extraordinarily moving. The mirror balls bobbed and rolled in the waves. Light glinted off them, and their perfectly spherical surfaces reflected the sky and the clouds and the surrounding water and landscape. Onlookers watched an endless, silvery sea of mirrors bubble into existence. The ceaseless movement of the water pushed the globes together and pulled them apart with gentle clicks and squeaks, constantly transforming the shape of the work. It was a startling but dazzling sight: a mysterious sort of entity reproducing endlessly at the waters edge.

It is said that the Japanese still think of art as something far removed from daily life. And it is certainly true that contemporary art has yet to fully blossom here.

Historically, the port of Yokohama was the first location in Japan opened to foreign influence, and clearly it still leads the way in that respect. It is extremely significant, I think, that Japans first major international exhibition of contemporary art was presented here, and on such an unprecedented scale. I wish we could see it happen not just triennially, but every year.

I wanted to celebrate a new beginning for contemporary art in Japan with that sea of shining mirror balls. And to celebrate, as well, the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Thinking back, I have travelled a long road to get here. My constant battle with art began when I was still a child. But my destiny was decided when I made up my mind to leave Japan and journey to America.

I landed in America on 18 November 1957.

Like others of the generation that grew up during the Pacific War, I had not studied any English at school; yet I felt no trepidation whatsoever about my first trip overseas. I had been dying to leave Japan and escape the chains that bound me.

In those days, however, there were still limits on the amount of foreign currency you could take out of the country. I had therefore decided to take sixty silk kimonos and some two thousand of my drawings and paintings. My plan was to survive by selling these.

I shall never forget my very first flight, on that aeroplane to America. The cabin was empty except for two American GIs, a war bride, and me.

Back then, no one travelled abroad in the lighthearted spirit you find today. There were all sorts of obstacles, many of which seemed almost insurmountable. First among the obstacles for me was my familys opposition. It took me eight full years to convince my mother to let me leave Japan.

My hometown is Matsumoto City, in Nagano Prefecture. Matsumoto is surrounded by the towering peaks of the Japanese Alps and the sun hides behind the western mountains early each afternoon. I used to wonder what lay beyond those daylight-swallowing mountains. Was there just a sheer precipice, and nothing else? Or was something there after all, something I knew nothing about? If so, what?

This childhood curiosity about unknown places developed eventually into a desire to see with my own eyes the foreign lands that were said to lie far beyond those rugged mountains. One day, I addressed a letter to the president of France:

Dear Sir, I would like to see your country, France.

Please help me.

I hardly expected the short but kindly reply that soon arrived:

Thank you for your interest in our country. There are various organizations devoted to cultural exchange between France and Japan. I have arranged for information to be sent to you. Your first task, however, is to study our language and pass the examination. I wish you every success