Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we are we're
stepping into a world that is just well it's
visually vibrating. That's a great way to put
it. It's a world of infinite reflections glowing
lights and of course dots. I mean thousands and
thousands of polka dots. Uncountable polka dots.
Exactly. And if you have been anywhere near a
major museum in the last say 10 years or honestly
if you've just scrolled through Instagram. You
have seen this work. Oh, it's unavoidable. Yeah.
In the best way. Yeah. We are, of course, talking
about the Princess of Polka Dots herself, Yayoi
Kusama. And it is such a fascinating subject
to tackle because when you think of Kusama, your
mind probably jumps right to those iconic images.
Right. The bright yellow pumpkins covered in
black spots or maybe those mirrored rooms that
feel like you're stepping into a galaxy. They
seem to go on forever. And the thing is, she's
currently acknowledged as the world's top selling
female artist. And not just female artist, the
most successful living artist, period. That's
a staggering title. Which is huge, a massive
title. But here's the hook. And this is the thing
that really stops you in your tracks when you
start digging into the research. While her art
is selling for millions, while she's collaborating
with these huge luxury brands like Louis Vuitton,
she doesn't live in a penthouse in Manhattan
or, you know, a villa in Tuscany. No, not at
all. Since 1977, she has voluntarily lived in
a mental health facility in Tokyo. That just,
it reframes everything. For nearly 50 years,
she has resided in this hospital by her own choice.
It's her safe space. She wakes up in her room
at the facility and she just walks a short distance
to her studio every single day to work. The routine
is the anchor. Completely. And that is our mission
for this deep dive. We want to unpack how a young
girl from rural Japan used actual terrifying
hallucinations to fuel an artistic revolution.
We have to. And we're going to look at her time
in 1960s New York, which was... I mean, it was
pivotal, it was wild, and honestly, it was pretty
heartbreaking for her. And we have to talk about
this concept she has, self -obliteration. It
sounds, well, it sounds scary, almost nihilistic.
It does, but it's the absolute key to unlocking
her entire philosophy. So this isn't just an
art history lesson for you. Not at all. This
is a study of resilience. It's about the intersection
of severe mental health struggles and breathtaking
creativity and race. And frankly, it's a critique
of the art market's long history of sexism and
racism. It really is a history she experienced
firsthand. So let's go back way back to the beginning,
before the pumpkins, before New York, before
the fame. We need to go to Matsumoto, Japan in
1929. Right. So Yayu Kusama was born into a pretty
well -off family. They were wealthy merchants
who owned a plant nursery and a huge seed farm.
So you have to imagine the setting. From day
one, she is literally surrounded by plants, flowers,
just fields and fields of zinnias and peonies.
It sounds idyllic, doesn't it? Like something
out of a fairy tale. It sounds beautiful, like
a Studio Ghibli movie setting. But from what
all the sources say, the reality inside the house
was anything but. It was incredibly traumatic.
Yeah, idyllic is not the word. Her family dynamics
were, let's say, complicated. Complicated is
being very generous. Extremely. The environment
was a pressure cooker. Her mother was reportedly
physically abusive and just intensely, viciously
unsupportive of Yayo's art. I read that Kusama
would be drawing pictures of, you know. The pumpkins
or the flowers she saw in the nursery. And her
mother would just rush in and snatch them away
from her before she could finish. Just rip them
up. Just to discourage her. To crush that impulse.
Exactly. And that explains why she developed
this lifelong habit of rushing to finish her
art. It's not just a burst of passion. It was
a panic -driven need to get the image out before
it could be destroyed. And then there's the father.
The father was a serial womanizer. And in a really,
really disturbing twist that shaped Kusama's
entire psyche, her mother would force young Yayoi
to spy on her father's extramarital affairs.
That is just horrific. To send a child to do
that, I can't even imagine. It's psychological
warfare on a child. And it had this profound
lifelong impact. Kusama said very explicitly
that this experience instilled in her a lifelong
contempt for sexuality. A fear, really. A deep
fear. She developed an intense phobia. of the
male body specifically the phallus there's a
quote where she says the sexual obsession and
fear of sex sit side by side in me that's the
core conflict so you have this high stress abusive
environment and then right in the middle of all
this family trauma the hallucinations start she's
only what 10 years old about 10 yes and this
is the true origin story of the polka dots this
wasn't a cool aesthetic choice she made no she
describes this pivotal moment She was sitting
at the dining table looking at a red flower pattern
on the tablecloth, just staring at it. And when
she looked up... The pattern was everywhere.
Everywhere. She saw that same red flower pattern
covering the ceiling, then the windows, then
the walls. And it didn't just stop there in the
room. No. This is the terrifying part. She looked
down and saw the pattern crawling over her own
body, her clothes, her hands. She felt like the
universe was being covered in these dots. She
felt she was being... Obliterated. Completely
erased. And this wasn't just, oh, I see spots.
This was a full sensory overload. She talks about
flashes of light, auras, dense fields of dots.
She even said the violets in the fields would
speak to her, that they had human -like faces.
That is genuinely terrifying for a child. It's
the definition of a waking nightmare. Yeah. The
patterns threatened to engulf her. In one account,
she ran upstairs to escape the spell of the red
flyers, and she actually fell and sprained her
ankle. This wasn't a daydream. It was a visceral,
physical, frightening event. And so art became
the only way out. The only way to cope. It was
her escape mechanism. If she could paint the
dots, if she could draw the nets she saw, then
maybe she could control them. By capturing the
fear on paper, she could keep it from swallowing
her whole? Precisely. But then you have to layer
on top of all of that the historical context.
She's now entering her teenage years during World
War II. Right. So at age 13, she's conscripted
to work in a military factory. And she's sewing
parachutes for the Japanese army. Can you imagine
a more stark image? A young girl who was having
these intense, colorful hallucinations, forced
to sit in a dark factory, sewing gray silk parachutes
for a war. She described her adolescence as being
spent in closed darkness, just hearing air raid
sirens constantly, seeing American B -29 bombers
flying overhead. And that environment, the repression
of the war, the trauma at home, it just solidified
this desperate need for personal and creative
freedom. She felt completely suffocated from
all signs. So the war ends, she survives, and
she tries to become an artist in post -war Japan.
She studies Nihonga. Yes, which is a very traditional
style of Japanese painting. She went to Kyoto
to study it. But she hated it. despise it she
found it far too restrictive the whole master
disciple system the rigid rules about what materials
you could use the specific techniques it didn't
work for an artist who's trying to paint her
own mind so she decided she had to leave she
had to she famously said that japanese society
at the time was in her words too small too servile
too fetalistic and too scornful of women yeah
She knew she had no future there. She makes a
break for it, but before she leaves, she does
something incredibly dramatic. It feels like
a scene from a movie. It really does. She took
thousands of her early works, thousands of drawings
and paintings, down to the riverbank behind her
family's house, and she burned them. A bonfire
of her own art. It was a total clean slate, a
funeral for her past self. She was severing ties
completely. She was going to America, and as
she put it, she was going to survive or die trying.
She sewed dollar bills into the lining of her
kimono and left. And she didn't just go blindly.
She had this wild idea to reach out to Georgia
O 'Keeffe. How does that even happen? It was
a total Hail Mary pass. She was in a bookstore
in Matsumoto, found a book of O 'Keeffe's paintings,
and was just stunned by them. She felt a connection.
She found her address and just wrote a letter.
A young, unknown artist from rural Japan writing
to one of the titans of American art. Seeking
advice, you know, asking how to make it in the
art world. And the most shocking part is that
O 'Keefe wrote back. That's amazing. It is. O
'Keefe was very kind, but also realistic. She
warned Kusama that it was incredibly hard for
artists in America to make a living, especially
for a woman and a foreigner at that. But she
didn't say don't come. No. And that correspondence
gave Kusama the courage she needed. It was a
lifeline. And O 'Keefe became a sort of mentor.
Later on, when Kusama was in New York and basically
starving, O 'Keeffe convinced her own art dealer
to buy some of Kusama's work just to save her
from financial ruin. That's a true act of solidarity.
So 1957, she arrives in the U .S., first Seattle
for a year, then the big move to New York City
in 1958. And this is the absolute height of abstract
expressionism. It's Pollock de Kooning Rothko.
It is a swaggering macho boys club. And this
is where she creates her first major breakthrough
works, the Infinity Nets. Let's unpack what those
are because they aren't the pumpkins yet. No,
no pumpkins yet. These were paintings, but they
were enormous. I mean, some canvases were 30
feet long, just these vast fields of color. And
they were just. covered in tiny loops of paint
entirely covered in these small repeated web
-like loops or nets of paint it was an obsessive
act she would paint for 40 50 hours straight
without sleeping without eating it goes right
back to that hallucination of the tablecloth
doesn't it it's a direct translation she was
painting the net that she felt was covering the
universe threatening to obliterate her and the
critical reception surprisingly was very strong
Really? In that macho art scene? Yes. The minimalist
heavyweight Donald Judd, who later became a romantic
partner for a time, he bought one and wrote a
glowing review. The critic Herbert Reid praised
them. She was even the only female artist in
a really important group show in Amsterdam called
Null or Zero in 1962. So she's getting critical
respect. She's in the mix. She's not an outsider
in that sense. She's in the critical conversation,
yes. But she's making zero money. She talks in
her autobiography about being so poor she would
scavenge fish heads and cabbage leaves from the
market garbage to make soup. She was freezing
in her unheated loft. And then we get to the
theft. This part of the story, I mean, it just
makes my blood boil every time I read about it.
It's a crucial turning point. And it explains
so much of her later breakdown and paranoia.
We're in the early 60s now. And Kusama moves
from painting into sculpture. She starts making
what she called soft sculptures. These are the
objects covered in the white stuffed phallic
shapes, right? Exactly. She would take everyday
objects, an armchair, a ladder, a rowboat, shoes,
and cover them in thousands of these white phallic
protrusions that she sewed by hand from fabric.
And this connects directly back to her fear of
sex, her phobia. Directly. She called it accumulation.
She said she was terrified of the phallus, so
by making thousands of them, by surrounding herself
with them, she was trying to conquer that fear
through sheer repetition. It was kind of self
-prescribed aversion therapy. Okay, so she's
doing this absolutely groundbreaking, psychologically
charged work. And then what happens with Clay
Soldenberg? In 1963, Kusama has a show where
she exhibits a couch completely covered in these
phallic shapes. Clay Zoldenberg, who was already
a very famous pop artist, was in the same group
show. And what was his work like at the time?
He was working with hard materials, plaster,
bubble mache. He'd never made a soft sculpture
before. I think I see where this is going. He
saw Kusama's couch. It got all the attention.
Shortly after that show... Oldenburg debuts his
first soft sculptures, you know, the giant plush
hamburgers, the soft telephone. It became his
signature style, the thing that made him a global
superstar. And it was Kusama's idea. It was so
blatant that Oldenburg's wife at the time, Patty
Musha, actually went up to Kusama at an exhibit
and apologized. She basically said, I'm so sorry
I took your idea. Wow. An apology. But that doesn't
help her career. Not at all. And then it happened
again with Andy Warhol. Oh, this is the wallpaper
incident. Yes. Kusama did an installation called
1 ,000 Boats. She took a real rowboat, covered
it in her silver phalluses, and then she wallpapered
the entire room, walls, ceiling, floor, with
999 repeated silkscreen photocopies of the boat.
It was the first immersive single -image environment.
And who came to that exhibit? Andy Warhol. He
came to the show, was incredibly enthusiastic,
shouting how wonderful and brilliant it was.
And just a short time after that, he has a show
at another gallery where he covers all the walls
with his now famous cow wallpaper. So you have
Oldenburg taking the soft sculpture, Warhol taking
the repeated wallpaper environment. And Kusama's
just watching this happen. She fell into a deep,
deep depression. She said she felt her innovations
were being stolen by these white... male artists
who were then catapulted to international stardom
while she was still struggling to buy food. Experts
who've looked at this, like curator Helene Posner,
they point directly to the mix of sexism and
racism in the art world at the time. Of course.
She didn't have the institutional backing, the
boys club support that those men got. She was
this lone Japanese woman doing this incredibly
strange, intense work. She was too easy to plagiarize
and ignore. And it's just heartbreaking. She
was literally trying to work through the idea
of obliteration and she was being professionally
obliterated. And ironically. That pressure led
to her next great innovation. Sewing thousands
of phalluses was physically grueling. It was
painful. It took forever. So to solve that labor
problem, she turned to mirrors. In 1965, she
created her first infinity mirror room called
Fally's Field. She filled a small mirrored room
with her phallus -covered soft sculptures on
the floor. And suddenly, with mirrors, she could
create endless repetition, infinite space. Which
became the precursor to the rooms that everyone
lines up for today. But back then, she was pivoting
again. She started moving away from the gallery
scene. Well, she was so disillusioned, right?
So she moved into the streets, the era of the
happenings. This is the late 60s. The hippie
counterculture is in full swing. And Kusama embraced
it fully. She started organizing these wild performance
art pieces in Central Park, on the Brooklyn Bridge,
even crashing the Museum of Modern Art. And these
involved a lot of polka dots. And a lot of public
nudity. A lot of nudity. She would paint polka
dots on the naked bodies of participants. These
were often political protests against the Vietnam
War. What was the connection there? The dots
and the war? Her idea was that if we were all
covered in the same polka dots, we lose our individual
egos, we become one with the universe. And you
can't fight a war if you're all just particles
in the cosmos. It was her philosophy of self
-obliteration made public and political. We have
to talk about the letter to Richard Nixon. Because
that is just... unbelievably bold. Chuckles.
It really is. She wrote an open letter to then
President Nixon and she offered to have sex with
him if he would stop the Vietnam War. She actually
wrote that. Oh, yeah. The quote is something
like, let's forget ourselves, dearest Richard,
and become one with the absolute all together
in the... altogether. It was this mix of genuine
anti -war sentiment and brilliant self -promotion.
That is quite an offer. I am assuming he did
not take her up on it. He did not respond, though.
But it got her a lot of press. She also staged
the grand orgy to awaken the dead at the MoMA
in 1969. Wait, at the MoMA? Inside the museum?
In the Sculpture Garden, yeah. She led a group
of eight nude performers, her disciples, into
the garden. They took off their clothes, stepped
into the fountain, and started mimicking the
poses of the famous sculptures by Malol and Picasso
that were there. It was completely unannounced,
right? A gorilla performed? Totally. It was scandalous.
It was meant to be a critique of the stiff, dead
institution of the museum. And then there was
the Finesse Biennale in 1966. She wasn't officially
invited to participate, was she? No, she just
showed up. This was her piece, Narcissus Garden.
She got some funding, had 1 ,500 plastic mirrored
balls made, and set them up on the lawn outside
the Italian pavilion. And she stood there in
a gold kimono. Selling the balls to passersby
for $2 each. $2? Yeah. She had a sign that said,
Your Narcissism for Sale. It was this brilliant,
biting critique of the art market's commercialism.
She was literally selling people their own reflection
for cash. The organizers must have loved that.
Oh, they shut her down immediately. Yeah. They
said, you can't sell art like you're selling
hot dogs or ice cream cones at the Biennale.
But the point was made. But while she's making
all these splashes in New York, getting famous
as this avant -garde provocateur, the reaction
back home in Japan was not so great. It was devastating
for her and her family. The news of her nude
happenings and orgies reached Japan's conservative
society. It brought immense shame to her family.
I read that her high school actually removed
her name from the alumni list. They did. They
completely disowned her. She was a pariah. And
all this time, her mental health was really,
really deteriorating. Constantly. She was hospitalized
regularly for exhaustion and overwork. She was
attempting suicide. And her one real anchor in
this very chaotic world was her relationship
with the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell. He
was much older than her, right? 26 years older.
It was a very passionate but entirely platonic
relationship. Her phobia of sex prevented anything
physical, but they were inseparable. They sketched
each other, wrote letters every day. He was her
emotional support. And when he died in 1972,
she just she lost her footing in New York. So
1973, she returns to Japan. And this starts what
biographers call the crash period. It's a complete
crash. She goes back in ill health, both physically
and mentally. And the reception in Japan was
just. The press labeled her a scandal queen.
She couldn't get her career going again. No.
She was deeply depressed. She was unable to paint.
She tried to start an art dealing business and
it failed. She attempted suicide again. It really
seemed like her career and maybe her life was
over. She was largely forgotten by the Western
art world and completely rejected by the Japanese
art world. And then comes the decision that changes
everything. The year is 1977. She finds a doctor
who is pioneering the use of art therapy. And
she makes a radical choice. She checks herself
into the Sewa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in
Tokyo. And a while later, she decides to stay.
And she has been there ever since. By her own
choice. By choice. It provided a structure, the
safety, the quiet she needed to survive. Her
studio is just a short walk away. She's built
a life where she can manage her illness and create
her art. She says, I fight pain, anxiety and
fear every day. And the only method I have found
that relieved my illness is to keep creating
art. And during those early years in the hospital,
when the art world had kind of moved on. She
didn't stop working. She just changed her medium.
She became a writer. She did. A very prolific
one. She wrote these shocking, visceral, surreal
novels and poetry. Books with titles like Manhattan's
Suicide Addict and The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher
Street. They kept her creative spark alive when
painting was too difficult. We should note, though,
there is a controversy that has come up around
this literary period. Yes, and it's very important
to mention it. In her 1983 autobiography and
some of her other early writings, there were
some undeniably racist comments about black people.
It's a really difficult aspect of her legacy
to reconcile, especially given her whole counterculture,
love and peace persona from the 60s. Absolutely.
In late 2023, after these writings came to wider
attention, she did issue an apology for the remarks,
expressing deep regret. But it's a really important
reminder that even figures we view as these progressive
revolutionaries can hold deep -seated and harmful
prejudices. Right. It's part of the whole complicated
picture of who she is. So she's in the hospital.
She's writing. How does she get from being this
forgotten scandal queen to being on Louis Vuitton
handbags? What's the turning point? It was a
very slow climb back. For most of the 70s and
80s, she was in obscurity. But in 1989, a retrospective
at the Center for International Contemporary
Arts in New York sort of reintroduced her to
the West. But the really big moment was 1993.
That was the game changer. She was chosen to
represent Japan. at the Venice Biennale. The
very same place she was kicked out of for selling
mirrored balls in 1966. The exact same place.
And this time she had her own pavilion. She was
the first woman to represent Japan with a solo
exhibition. That brought her back onto the global
stage in a massive way. And that's when the pumpkins
really started to become her icon. The pumpkins.
They are so iconic. Why pumpkins? Of all the
things in her childhood nursery, why did that
stick? She's just always loved them. She says
her grandfather used to take her to the seed
harvesting grounds and there would be these fields
of them. To her, they represent a kind of alter
ego. She finds them humorous, warm, comforting.
She's called their form generous unpretentiousness.
And that's when she installed the famous yellow
one on Naoshima Island in Japan in 1994. Yes,
the one at the end of the pier staring out at
the sea. It became this huge. pilgrimage site
for art lovers it actually got washed away in
a typhoon a few years ago but it was so beloved
they reinstated it and from there the commercial
success just it exploded it did white num 28
one of those early infinity net paintings sold
for 7 .1 million dollars in 2014 As of 2012,
she already had the highest turnover of any living
female artist. And then, yes, the Louis Vuitton
collaborations. The first one was in 2012 with
Marc Jacobs, and then again in 2023. Suddenly,
her dots were everywhere. On handbags, on storefronts,
you had George Clooney and ads covered in her
dots. She became a global brand. But the most
fascinating part of this revival to me is the
Instagram era. Her work feels like it was almost
designed for social media decades before it existed.
That is the great irony of her late career fame.
The infinity mirror rooms became these unbelievable
viral sensations. Museums like the Broad in L
.A. or the Hirshhorn in D .C. had lines around
the block with timed 30 -second tickets. For
the perfect selfie. For the perfect selfie. And
then you have the obliteration room where visitors
enter a completely white domestic space and are
given colorful dot stickers to place anywhere
they want. It's pure engagement bait. It's interactive.
It's colorful. But there's a much deeper meaning
there that maybe the selfie takers are missing.
Let's talk about that, because her work, these
rooms, they were created out of a fear of self
-obliteration. They were expressions of isolation,
of anxiety, of the feeling of losing your ego
and dissolving into the infinite. And now people
use them to perfectly frame themselves, to center
themselves in a photo. Look at M .E. in the infinity.
The ultimate act of self -promotion. Exactly.
Her 1966 piece, Narcissus Garden, was a critique
of narcissism. Now her work has become the ultimate
backdrop for digital narcissism. It's a really
strange and fascinating evolution. So let's dig
into the philosophy of self -obliteration a bit
deeper, because it's not just about disappearing
or dying. No, not at all. She has this great
quote, polka dots are a way to infinity. What
does that mean to her? Well, she sees the dot
as having this dual form. It's the sun, which
is energy and life, and it's also the moon, which
is calm and serene. So when she covers a room
or a body or a canvas in these dots, the individual
ego, the self, it disappears. You become part
of the environment. You become part of the larger
universe. So it's almost a spiritual unification,
a kind of Buddhist concept of oneness. In a way,
yes. But it's always rooted in her disability,
in her mental illness. The curator, Mika Yoshitake,
made a really great point that these immersive
works are designed to make the audience sympathize
with her intrusive thoughts and hallucinations.
She wants you to feel what she feels. She wants
you to feel that disorientation, that sense of
endless, overwhelming repetition. So when we
walk into one of those mirror rooms, we are,
in a sense, stepping inside her hallucinations.
And art becomes medicine. It is her medicine.
She says she doesn't see art as an end in itself.
For her, it is a means to address the illness
that originated in her childhood. It is, quite
simply, survival. That puts a completely different
spin on the fun polka dots in the cool mirror
rooms. You aren't just looking at pretty colors.
You are standing inside someone's trauma that
they have managed to externalize to stay alive.
It absolutely does. It makes the work so much
more powerful and incredibly poignant. So to
recap. We have gone from a little girl in a seed
farm, seeing the tablecloth pattern crawl up
her arms, to a dark parachute factory during
a war, to the cutthroat sexist art world of 60s
New York, to being forgotten and checking herself
into a mental hospital in Tokyo, and then finally
to absolute global domination as the world's
most successful living artist. It is one of the
most remarkable trajectories in all of art history.
It's just a story of sheer, unbelievable endurance.
I can't think of another one quite like it. It
really is unique. So here's a final... thought
for you to take with you the next time you see
a yayoi kusama pumpkin or you see a friend post
that perfect selfie from an infinity mirror room
just pause for a second right we see these works
now as so joyful so colorful so instagrammable
but knowing what we know now that they stem from
terrifying hallucinations from abuse from a desperate
fear of being obliterated Does that change how
we look at them? It has to, doesn't it? And it
raises a question. When we engage with her work,
are we participating in her healing process or
are we just consuming her trauma because it looks
cool on our feed? Is it sympathy or is it just
aesthetics? That's the question. Look a little
closer at the dots next time. Thanks for listening
to this deep dive. See you next time.