2026年8月27日 更新

2026年8月14日，草间弥生于97岁辞世。

绘画、雕塑、装置、行为艺术、小说、诗歌——在近一个世纪的生命历程中，草间弥生探索了丰富多样的艺术形式，不断更新并拓展自己的创作实践。回望她漫长而非凡的艺术生涯，可以看到一条始终贯穿其中的探索脉络：对重复、增殖、无限，以及自我与世界之间边界的持续追问。

本线上展厅将聚焦于蚀刻版画，作为草间弥生庞大而多元的创作实践中的一个面向。通过刻线、重复，以及将腐蚀过程中产生的偶然性变化融入创作，这些作品以高度凝练的形式，呈现了草间弥生贯穿一生所追寻的艺术创作核心。

与此同时，本次呈现的蚀刻版画仅仅是草间弥生庞大作品体系中的一小部分。9月11日起，草间弥生大型回顾展将在阿姆斯特丹市立博物馆开幕，继贝耶勒基金会和路德维希博物馆之后，于阿姆斯特丹继续巡展。展览汇集包括绘画、雕塑、装置在内的多元作品，为观众提供了一个回溯草间弥生逾七十年艺术创作历程的机会。

我们希望，本次线上展厅能成为进入草间弥生艺术世界的一个入口，也期待您有机会在阿姆斯特丹市立博物馆亲身感受她毕生构筑的广阔创作天地。

Ota Fine Arts is pleased to present 1 Plate, 1 Color, 1 Run: Etchings by Yayoi Kusama, an online viewing room dedicated to a focused selection of monochrome print works by Yayoi Kusama.

Bringing together a group of Kusama’s black-and-white etchings, this presentation highlights a body of work in which repetition, accumulation, and proliferating forms emerge with particular clarity. Stripped of colour, these works reveal the structural foundations of Kusama’s visual language in an immediate and distilled form.

For Kusama, printmaking has long provided an important means of exploring repetition, accumulation, and infinity. This presentation focuses primarily on minimal and highly abstract compositions, drawing attention to the formal rigour and tension inherent in her print practice. Dense networks of lines, subtle relationships between positive and negative space, and quietly rhythmic repetitions evoke the sense of infinity that the artist has pursued throughout her career, articulated here through the restrained language of monochrome.

By stepping away from the strongly iconic imagery often associated with Kusama’s work, this online presentation foregrounds the abstract qualities and material specificity of printmaking itself. It is conceived both as an accessible entry point for new audiences and as an opportunity for longtime collectors to reconsider Kusama’s practice from a different perspective.

“At that time, Kusama was making lithographs and etchings in the hospital corridor. She later told me that there was no heating there and her hands were frozen stiff as she worked on the etchings."  

Kimura Kihachi *

Many of Kusama’s etchings were produced in close collaboration with master printer Kimura Kihachi, notably during 1984–85 and 1994–95. Kimura recalled the artist working in an unheated hospital corridor, gripping her stylus with hands numbed by cold. Rather than eliminating incidental scratches or irregularities created during the etching process, Kusama embraced them as integral elements of the image, intensifying the works’ vitality and psychological charge.

As a medium fundamentally rooted in reproduction, printmaking offered a particularly resonant framework for her lifelong exploration of infinity. Few artistic practices demonstrate such a close correspondence between concept and medium.

* Kimura Kihachi quotation from Printer Kihachi: Artists Whom He Supported (Kimura Kihachi Print Studio, 2009), p. 90. Additional contextual interpretation adapted from an essay by Akira Shibutami.

** Charlotte Sarrazin, “Yayoi Kusama,” in Yayoi Kusama, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Hatje Cantz, 2025, p. 228.