Revisit this memorable conversation with Yayoi Kusama from March 2000

​​Welcome to the Archive Pull, a series delving into the 30-year history of our print magazine. Here, we look back at a conversation with iconic Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama from the March 2000 issue of Dazed & Confused

We understand that your work always stems from your interior imagination. It’s obvious you have had many intense feelings in your life. Is that intensity the same as it was when you were a child? 

Yayoi Kusama: I am still walking the same path. Still the same. It is just that my work has become larger in scale, as you can see. I always used to draw in my notebooks as a child. 

So the mode of expression has changed but not the sentiment. 

Yayoi Kusama: Yes. For example, I see thousands of cows in the pink sky and I quickly draw them in my notebooks so that I never forget an image. 

Do you ever feel at ease in your life? 

Yayoi Kusama: Only when I take the drugs prescribed for me by my doctors. I actually took some a few moments ago as I have not been feeling well today. I have been in a mental hospital for over 20 years. 

And yet it seems that you are your own best doctor...

Yayoi Kusama: Doctors at hospitals are too academic. By removing my originality from me, they try to proclaim their triumph over my desire. 

Has the reception of your work in Japan changed? 

Yayoi Kusama: Yes. I used to be ostracised but I still kept on painting. Last year I was finally accepted. 

Why do you think they have changed? 

Yayoi Kusama: Because they are authoritarian. They suddenly started respecting me after I had a major retrospective. 

Do you relate to Japanese society or culture in any way?

Yayoi Kusama: It is 50 years behind. 

What can be done to create a better environment for young Japanese artists? 

Yayoi Kusama: We need a good leader in Japan. 

What kind of leader would have stopped you leaving Japan for New York in the early 60s? 

Yayoi Kusama: I’ve never followed leaders.

Yayoi Kusama is an artist with an extraordinary and unusual gift. A prominent figure in the New York art scene in the 1960s and collaborator with artists such as Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell and Lucio Fontana, since childhood she has suffered from bizarre and magnificent hallucinations caused by a rare mental disorder.

Now, after more than 20 years of self-imposed exile at the Seiwa Institute in Tokyo, she has once again taken centre stage in the world of contemporary art, to be heralded as a lost genius, as innovative as she is unique. Born in Japan in 1929, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do Japanese family, Yayoi Kusama was always considered to be a strange and disturbed child. From her earliest days at school, she was marked as an outsider, content to remain within a self-constructed world of paint and pastels. Suffering intermittently from prolonged hallucinations, in which she believed herself to be consumed by her immediate surroundings and even at one point believing that she was a dog, she discovered solace in art. By her early 20s, painting had become her last refuge, a safe place in which to control the rampant excesses of her mind. Ostracised by her family and unable to adapt to her social surroundings, her work became more and more extreme until the mid-1950s, when her art and her condition became synonymous. “I was so desperate that I made my art during my hallucinations. When I was studying Nihonga Japanese-style painting that employs traditional glue-based mineral pigments in Kyoto, I would go out in the rain to practice Zen, wearing only a T-shirt. I would meditate in the mud in a heavy downpour, go home when the sun came out and pour icy water over my head. I could not work otherwise."

Transforming her life into a form of self-therapy against her psychosomatic condition was a seemingly impossible task, and one that was never entirely understood in Japan. By 1960, the strain of living in a restrictive social environment led Kusama to travel abroad to America, where she believed she would be accepted as an artist. In New York, she became part of a vibrant art scene that was willing to embrace her peculiarities as a sign of innate creativity rather than an illness that should be cured.

“I was so desperate that I made my art during my hallucinations” – Yayoi Kusama

During the next decade, Kusama became a key progenitor of the New York scene, going out with both Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd, and acting as a confidant for Judd in a manner that helped push the artist into kick-starting the Minimalist movement. “Judd was a theorist. Simply put, he could not make an ordinary kind of work. In a sense, half his work at that time was my making. He once griped, ‘What shall I do now? I am at a loss.’ I responded, ‘This, this is it,’ kicking a square box that we had picked up somewhere and turned into our table. That gave him a hint for his box pieces.”

In the years that followed 1960, Kusama also developed her own distinctive style, the Infinity Net, which would centre on a dot matrix in infinite detail. A monochromatic net with an endless repetition of dots and circles causing a dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling occupied the entire canvas. “They are about an obsession: an infinite repetition,” Kusama recalled later, although the origins of the Infinity Net paintings and subsequent polka dot motifs can be traced back to a specific series of hallucinations that she experienced when she was ten years old.

In a passage from her first book The Struggle And Wanderings Of My Soul in 1975, she describes one particularly acute attack. “One day, looking at a red flower-patterned tablecloth on the table, I turned my eyes to the ceiling and saw the same red flower pattern everywhere, even on the window glass and posts. The room, my body, the entire universe was filled with it, my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space. This was not an illusion but reality. I was astounded. If I did not get away from there, I would be wrapped up in the spell of the red flowers and lose my life. I ran for the stairs without thinking of anybody else. Looking down, I saw the steps fall away one by one, pulling my leg and making me trip and fall from the top of the stairs. I sprained my leg. Dissolving and accumulating, proliferating and separating. A feeling of particles disintegrating and reverberations from an invisible universe...”.

“One day, looking at a red flower-patterned tablecloth on the table, I turned my eyes to the ceiling and saw the same red flower pattern everywhere, even on the window glass and posts. The room, my body, the entire universe was filled with it, my self was eliminated” – Yayoi Kusama

Suffering such extreme hallucinations at a very early age caused Kusama to experience a feeling of intense depersonalisation, as if her surroundings were in some way sublimating her perception of herself. Relying on her imagination to make order out of this chaos, her unending repetition of the Infinity Net was as much a reaffirmation of her existence as it was an act of self-obliteration. For Kusama, painting and sculpture meant much more than a simple, intellectual exercise. They became the difference between life and death. In 1961, she extended her artistic repertoire to include a collection of sculptural manifestations entitled Accumulations. Taking the form of household furniture, high-heeled shoes and even a rowing boat, Kusama covered the objects with stuffed phallic appendages. The overall effect was one of an uncontrollable disease that had taken hold of the inanimate objects a kind of cancerous growth as surreal as it was macabre. In fact, so powerful was the effect of these sculptures that many critics today associate Kusama with a Surrealist tendency.

“Nowadays, some people in New York call me a 'Surrealist-Pop' artist. I do not care for this kind of labelling. At one time, I was considered to share the sensibility of the monochrome painters of the early 1960s; at another time I was regarded as a Surrealist. People are confused and don’t know how to understand me." In 1964 she described her paintings to Gordon Brown as, "...very large paintings without composition without beginning, end or centre." In the same year, her obsession with the dot motif spread uncontrollably.

“At one time, I was considered to share the sensibility of the monochrome painters of the early 1960s; at another time I was regarded as a Surrealist. People are confused and don’t know how to understand me” – Yayoi Kusama

Driving Image Show, an installation at the Castellane Gallery, comprised a collection of mannequins painted with by-now familiar polka dots, right down to the shoes, flowers and teapot, table and chairs. On the floor, Kusama scattered dried pasta – to the consternation of visiting critics. One reviewer at the time noted, “Everything in this show is different: macaroni and noodles are spread out on the floor. Beat music sounds from the loudspeaker. A blue TV set gives the local news. Three window mannequins stand painted with dots. All the objects in the room have the measles: chairs, tables, ashtrays - even the cigarettes.” Describing her mindset at the time of making Driving Image-Show, Kusama wrote the following: “I feel as if I were driving on the highways or carried on a conveyor belt without ending until my death. This is like continuing to drink thousands of cups of coffee or eating thousands of feet of macaroni. This is to continue to desire and to escape all sorts of feelings and visions until the end of my days, whether I want to or not. I cannot stop living and yet I cannot escape from death."

In fact, her self-destructive edge came to the fore at the New York opening of the show when she unleashed two dogs directly into the unsuspecting crowd. Recalling the spectacle that night, she wrote in her diary, "Macaroni-coated dogs ran barking frantically through the legs of viewers who were screaming in fright at the sound of the macaroni cracking under their feet." Two years later, in 1966, Kusama was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. Dressed in traditional Japanese kimono, she installed Narcissus Garden, a giant installation of 1,500 mirrored balls spread across a lawn like a kinetic floor covering, and then promptly began to sell off the art for 1,200 lira a piece. This caused the authorities to enter into crisis mode, forcing them to ban her from the Biennale. Her fascination with mirrors persisted and in the same year she produced two exquisite pieces entitled Kusama’s Peep Show and Infinity Mirror Room respectively, the former being a real-life peep show with Kusama as the naked model.

By 1967, Kusama became still more adventurous and started to experiment with body painting, covering bikini-clad models with polka dots. This was the height of Kusama’s popularity. In 1967 she received more column inches than Andy Warhol. By 1968 she had capitalised on her reputation by staging a series of happenings or Atomic Explosions every Saturday and Sunday afternoon in New York’s city parks where Kusama would invite members of the public to strip and be made into art. She also completed a film entitled Self-Obliteration with underground filmmaker Jud Yalkut. These events were highly publicised by press releases and attracted a lot of press interest, causing some newspapers to refer to her as ‘The Priestess of Nudity’ or just plain ‘Dotty’.

“As we soar through the heavens, we’ll paint each other with polka dots, lose our egos in timeless eternity and finally discover the naked truth: you can’t eradicate violence by using more violence” – Yayoi Kusama

Performances in front of public buildings such as the New York Stock Exchange, the Statue of Liberty and the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park caused even more uproar, as did her open letter to Richard Nixon in 1968 in a concerted yet bizarre plea for peace in Vietnam. In this strange reflection of 1960s idealism, Kusama wrote, “Our earth is like one little polka dot, among millions of other celestial bodies, one orb full of hatred and strife amid the peaceful, silent spheres. Let’s you and I change all that and make this world a new Garden of Eden. Let’s forget ourselves, dearest Richard, and become one with the Absolute, all together in the altogether. As we soar through the heavens, we’ll paint each other with polka dots, lose our egos in timeless eternity and finally discover the naked truth: you can’t eradicate violence by using more violence."

In another 1968 tract, celebrating the virtues of nudity, entitled Take A Subway Ride From Jail To Paradise, Kusama appropriated the language of Situationist detournment to extol the need for direct, social action: “Ask Miss Subway to take it off! Every morning, as you go to work in the subway, you see the same girl or boy waiting for a train, sitting opposite you in miniskirt or slacks, or getting off at your station. By now, you have certainly chosen your favourite, the girl or boy you have never met but would like to know most. Why remain strangers? Let’s get to know each other! We know the surest way: Let’s take off our clothes in the subway!” Finally, after a concerted effort to commercialise her work by setting up a fashion house, a poster studio and a series of what became known as Kusama Orgies, Kusama succumbed to another period of prolonged illness. By 1970, her media profile had diminished to such an extent that not one article was written about her or her work. Demoralised and broke, she returned to Japan after being away for over a decade.

Over the years that followed, Kusama entered the wilderness with very few Japanese critics able to relate to her work. In 1977 her mental illness became so acute that she entered the Seiwa Institute in Tokyo as a long-term patient. She has never left, working every day from 9am to 9pm on new work, including a giant series of Accumulation sculptures and Infinity Net paintings that continue her obsession with will to repetition, the dot and the phallus.

In addition to her artwork, she has become a celebrated author, completing her first novel, Manhattan Suicide Addict in hospital in 1978 with 12 novels following. Having been a major player in New York in the 1960s, Kusama had to wait until 1993 until her artistic legacy became internationally recognised. In that year, she was the first woman to be invited to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale, where she chose to exhibit a fusion of two previous works from the mid-1960s, the Peep Show and Infinity Mirror Room. The finalised piece, entitled simply Mirror Room, was painted with black on yellow polka dots. Within the installation stood a mirrored cubicle with a single opening on one side. Through that window, the viewer could gaze on what seemed to be an infinite field of papier-mache pumpkins, all sporting the same colouring as the outside installation. At the private view, Kusama wore a long sorcerer’s robe and peaked cap, both of which matched her surroundings. It was as if the difference between artist and work had become indecipherable. In this way, Kusama symbolised her own fusion with her art; a great artist trapped in a mad world.

All quotes in this article are from Akira Tatehata's interview with Yayoi Kusama, unless otherwise stated. The interview is published in full in the latest monograph on the artist, published by Phaidon Press.