Photos: Yayoi Kusama ‘Japan’s Polka Dot Queen’ gets first museum in Tokyo

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The Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusuma, also celebrated as the “Polka Dot Queen”, is opening a museum of the same name in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district that could only be hers. The exhibition will open to the public on October 1st.

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Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST 9 photos

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Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama, known for her obsessive, dotted art and pumpkin motifs and the use of mirrors to create mystical “infinity rooms”, is opening a museum in Tokyo that could only be hers. The 88-year-old, who was named the world’s most popular artist by Art Newspaper in 2014, said she had fulfilled her “deep lifelong hope that everyone can see my works of art”. (Toru Hanai / REUTERS)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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A man looks at a Kusama exhibition “Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of a Million Light Years Away” at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, USA. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, central Japan, Kusama suffered from psychological trauma from antagonistic parents and drew dots and nets as a child due to her hallucinatory experiences. At 28, she moved to the United States and spent 16 years in New York at the height of the sexual liberation movement. (Joshua Roberts / REUTERS)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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The first exhibition at the museum in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district shows 45 works that were created between 2004 and 2017, including a series entitled “My Eternal Soul”. It includes a glittering pumpkin statue, large paintings with meticulously replicated drawings of dots and eyes, and red polka dots on mirrors in a toilet. In a statement, Kusuma said she wanted visitors to “see and feel my philosophy of life … all of my love for all loved ones through a sincere, lifelong pursuit of art”. (Toru Hanai / REUTERS)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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Kusama with two of her ‘works of art’. She painted naked bodies to make them more beautiful. At this exhibition in Utrecht in June 1968, one man was painted entirely while another refused to take off his trousers. In the United States, Kusuma was a friend and contemporary of the artists Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell. She had undergone Freudian analysis in New York for six years, but the treatment hampered her creativity. (KeyStone Features / Getty Images)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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“No matter what I painted or drew, no more ideas came out,” she said, “because everything came out of my mouth”. she said in a previous interview. When Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, she was burned out and was voluntarily admitted to a mental hospital, where she has lived ever since. (Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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It was not until the 1990s that Kusama was rediscovered. Her polka dots and pumpkins were a perfect fit for a heavily commercialized art market with collectors drawn to her instantly recognizable style. One of their characteristic, mirror-lined rooms with rows of yellow and black pumpkins reflected in infinity is installed on the fourth floor. (Toru Hanai / REUTERS)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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But tiny Kusama, whose painting sold for $ 7.1 million in 2014 – near the record for a living artist – refuses to take it easy. “Even now, not a day goes by that I don’t paint,” she told a small group of journalists when finished canvases were piled up on the walls and stains of color covered the gray carpeting. On two tables lay a newly begun azure canvas with rows of blindfolded black paint. (Toru Hanai / REUTERS)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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“I still see hallucinations now,” said Kusama, who wore her signature scarlet wig and an orange and black dress that was taken from her artwork. “Dots fly everywhere – on my dress, the floor, things I wear, all over the house, on the ceiling. And I paint them. ‘ The dots that have contributed to its name are present throughout the museum, which opens on October 1st – including the toilet, where mirrors enhance their effect. (Toru Hanai / REUTERS)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST

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“It will likely be a Mecca for Kusama,” said Yasuaki Ishizaka, the former head of Sotheby’s in Japan and now an art advisor. “She is one of the first Japanese – perhaps the only Japanese woman – to have a really popular following around the world, be it in Asia, Europe or the US, or among older or younger people.” (Toru Hanai / REUTERS)

Updated 09/28/2017 1:22 PM IST