From here to infinity

It is a rainy Friday evening in Singapore. I run all the way from the City Hall MRT station to the National Gallery to make it to my timed-entry slot of YAYOI KUSAMA: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow . Anticipating overwhelming demand, the Gallery has introduced two-hour slots for visitors to the exhibition, which contains 120 works across media ranging from acrylic on canvas to mirrored infinity rooms. But even the slot system cannot preclude the winding queues at the ticket booths. After all, Kusama was named the most popular artist in the world in 2014, after a staggering two million people flocked to her retrospective Infinite Obsession when it toured South and Central America.

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a city in the Nagano prefecture of Japan, to a wealthy family of seed merchants. Her mother’s family was so influential that her father adopted the Kusama family name. But her parents’ marriage was not a happy one and Kusama’s childhood was rife with misery due to her father’s philandering ways and her mother’s fiery temper. Her conservative mother was severely critical of Kusama’s artistic aspirations. In her autobiography, Infinity Net , Kusama recounts how her mother would destroy her unfinished works or flip over the table if she found Kusama painting. Art scholar Alexandra Munroe has speculated that this is why Kusama still works at breakneck speed — “as if racing to complete a vision before the chance to realise it is torn away.”

It was also in childhood that Kusama began to experience her first hallucinations — starting with a vision of flowers talking to her in her family’s fields at the age of 12. Soon after, she had a vision where the entire universe (including herself) was covered with red flowers. She writes that she was trapped in a “terrifying infinity net” that obliterated her. She believed that she had slipped into another world — as real as reality itself. And the only way to survive the terror was to create. Her art thus became her means to cope — both with the hallucinations and the “protracted gloom of the never-ending war” between her parents.

Even today, her obsession with obliteration and infinity are the overwhelming focus of her work. Life is the Heart of a Rainbow begins with paintings of “infinity nets” — giant canvases filled with nothing but nets replicated in compulsive detail. Staring into them is like staring at the sea. So overwhelming is their impact that during my visit, a child began to cry in front of an infinity net titled ‘Transmigration’, wailing that it scared him.

Infinity is also the focus of what is arguably her most well-known works — mirrored infinity rooms. These are small enclosed “rooms” with mirrors on every surface, which are populated with lights and/or other artefacts. Some infinity rooms are big enough for the viewer to walk into while others are large cubes with peepholes. Selfies taken in these infinity rooms are exceptionally popular on social media — their accompanying hashtag #infinitekusama has garnered over 36,500 posts on Instagram alone. Kusama has said that she welcomes this selfie-taking, as it complements her effort to make these works “a part of a communal experience”.

Life is the Heart of a Rainbow includes three mirrored infinity rooms. The biggest draw in the whole exhibition is ‘Gleaming Lights of the Souls’, a walk-in dark room with strategically hung LED lights that constantly change colour. Due to the overwhelming popularity of this work, visitors are only allowed 20 seconds in it.

Another motif in her work is the humble pumpkin. Kusama has written that the first time she saw a pumpkin, it began to speak to her animatedly and, ever since, she has loved the vegetable’s “generous unpretentiousness” and “solid spiritual balance”. The exhibition in Singapore includes several works bearing the pumpkin motif — acrylic on canvas and mixed-media paintings, giant sculptures covered with mosaic tiles, and a truly spectacular infinity room aptly titled ‘The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens’.

Yet another motif that has become synonymous with Kusama’s art, the polka dot is represented in ‘With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever’. In this work, three giant tulip sculptures spattered with polka dots blend into polka-dotted walls.

The exhibition also features several autobiographical works that depict Kusama’s tumultuous years in New York — her reputation as a scandal-maker, her anti-Vietnam War artivism, her disillusionment with being viewed as a “hothouse flower” by Americans due to her Japanese heritage, as well as her role in the counterculture movement of the ’70s. In 1973, she returned to Japan, where the art world did not know what to make of her. Disillusioned, she turned to writing and dabbled as an art dealer. Four years later, she checked into a sanatorium in Tokyo where she has lived, by choice, ever since. Across the street from the hospital is her studio.

Rounding up the exhibition is ‘My Eternal Soul’, an ongoing series of over 500 artworks that began in 2009. Distilling seven decades of her artistic focus, the epic scope and frenetic urgency of this series make it easy to visualise Kusama at work — outpacing everything that stands in the way of her need to create.

(Life is the Heart of a Rainbow is on view at National Gallery Singapore till September 3)

Amrita V Nairis a researcher and freelancewriter based in Singapore

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