Yayoi Kusama is a senior artist with a long and illustrious career. She is also one of the most significant post-war artists to emerge from Asia. Kusama has participated in more than 900 exhibitions internationally; 400 of these have been solo. A major retrospective of her work was mounted in New York in 1989 at the Center for International Contemporary Art. In 1993 Kusama exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale, the first time a Japanese artist was honoured with a solo exhibition. She has continued to have a series of solo exhibitions in recent years, the most notable of them being at Le Consortium Contemporary Art Center, Dijon, touring France, Denmark and Korea in 2000; at Serpentine Gallery, London in 2000; and 'Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968' at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, touring the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo in 1998. She has won numerous awards and is held in several major international collections including Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.

Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, Japan in 1929 and was the youngest of four children. By 1941, as a 12-year-old child, she had begun to notate and paint her hallucinations, which she experienced as veils of dots. During the early 1950s, Kusama recognised that the visual and aural hallucinations she had experienced for a decade were symptomatic of a condition known as 'rijin'sho' (depersonalisation syndrome). Kusama continues to experience these hallucinations to this day. As an adult, Kusama developed a vibrant visual iconography composed of dots, often transposed as nets or auras, that has become the familiar visual vocabulary dominating her artistic practice. She graduated from the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1949, holding her first solo exhibition in Japan in 1952 at the First Community Center at Matsumoto. Although she gained entry to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1953 she cancelled this trip and decided instead to go to New York in 1955, where she lived and worked until 1972.

In 1972 Kusama returned to Japan and in 1977, after a series of depressive episodes, admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital where she continues to reside today. Her condition has never stopped her from maintaining a vigorous artistic practice and in 2002, at the age of 73, she conceived Soul under the moon especially for APT 2002.

Kusama began exhibiting in New York in the late 1950s. It was during this period that she began painting her exquisite large white net paintings including Large white net 1958, which was exhibited at the Nova Gallery in Boston in that year. The 'Infinity net' paintings comprise thousands of diminutive, intersecting circles of paint forming a continuous matrix of dots 'without composition — without beginning, end or centre'.¹ They act as mediations between the 'veil' of the artist's perception and the immensity of an 'invisible universe', as 'reverberations' or visualisations of the sound of this encounter between the personal and the infinite, and form a way for the artist to reconcile her experienced hallucinatory world with the physical world around her.

The making of 'Infinity net' paintings has continued throughout Kusama's career. Her practice is grounded in a repetitive, obsessive manner of working. 'Her art — even her painting — was always fundamentally performatory, with the process overshadowing the product, and the artist subsuming the art.'² Kusama's practice embraces drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, performance, fashion, tabloid publishing, filmmaking, installation, novels, poetry and music. In 1961, Kusama began experimenting and extending her practice to construct her 'soft' sculptures, which were generally objects such as boats, coats, ladders, prams and shoes covered with phallic-shaped stuffed fabric protrusions. By the early sixties, Kusama's nets and obsessive mark-making spilled off the canvas into sculptural, environmental and installation works that were described by the artist as 'accumulations', 'repetitions', 'compulsion furniture', 'aggregations' and 'obsessions'. Her own body was soon enlisted as part of her work. Collages and theatrical photographs from the 1960s depict the artist 'embedded' in unexpected tableau that literally overflow with the disparate materials of her art, which include screenprints, macaroni, mannequins and fabric sculptures.

In 1963 she constructed her first 'Mirror/Infinity room', which featured blinking lights, for her solo exhibition 'Kusama's Peep Show' at the Castellane Gallery, New York. Kusama's Peep Show: endless love show, the second of two 'Infinity/Mirror rooms' made during the artist's New York years, was presented in 1966. These installations are architectural expressions of Kusama's 'Infinity net' works; they offer audiences the opportunity to immerse themselves in the artist's personal visual reality. Although many of Kusama's 'Mirror/Infinity rooms' were devised decades ago, it is only today that some of these ideas are being realised, extending the personal vision that has nourished and plagued the artist's life and work. In these works an astounding synthesis occurs between the intangible mystery of the artist's unique perception and the sensory expression offered by the 'Mirror/Infinity rooms'. Through experiencing the mesmerising environment of Soul under the moon, the most recent of Kusama's 'Mirror/Infinity rooms', audiences can begin to understand the artist's experiential world. With arresting immediacy, these spaces demand immersion and attention, highlighting the visual reverberation and unwavering urgency of Kusama's art. 

Essay by Rhana Devenport, former Senior Project Officer, APT. Adapted from 'Yayoi Kusama: It started from hallucination' by Rhana Devenport in APT 2002: The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2002, QAG, Brisbane, 2002, pp.58–61, September 2002.
 

Endnotes

1. Yayoi Kusama, 'Interview with Gordon Brown 1964' (extract), in L Hoptman, A Tatehata & U Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, Phaidon, London, 2000, p.103.
2. Lyn Zelevansky, 'Driving image: Yayoi Kusama in New York', in L Zelevansky, L Hoptman, A Tatehata & A Munroe, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958–1968, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1998, p.22.