Yayoi Kusama｜ 1979 - 2014: Kusama's Printmaking Story

After returning to Japan from the United States in 1973, Yayoi Kusama wanted her art to be widely known and hoped her works would reach the hands of many people. For her, printmaking, as a multiple art form, was the ideal medium. At a time when there was no market for contemporary artists like the one that exists today, and when male artists monopolized positions of standing in the Japanese art world, Kusama devoted herself to printmaking in order to survive. In her early works, beginning with Going to the Field with Shoes on (1979), one seems to glimpse the solitary figure of an artist who, while harboring a deep and brooding loneliness, was determined to take on the art world.

Striving for ever greater heights in printmaking, Kusama created work after work, varying her techniques, her color schemes, and the ways she combined motifs with dots and nets. It was during this period that the pumpkin, now an icon of Kusama's art, first appeared as a motif. She made frequent use of motifs evocative of Matsumoto in Shinshu, where she was born and raised, such as wildflowers, insects, fruit, fish, and mountain landscapes. At the same time, many motifs suggestive of urban life also appear, including high heels, dresses, coffee cups, and lemon squash. Kusama's proliferating dots and nets cover not only the backgrounds of her motifs but even their surfaces and individual parts. This attempt to compose figurative images from abstract patterns would later carry over into her sculptural works.

In addition to lithographs and screenprints, Kusama also worked in etching, a technique based on line drawing, and produced an outstanding body of work in the medium. Among these, the etchings titled Infinity Nets, Accumulation, and Endless can be seen as revisiting the abstraction she pursued in New York, where she moved in 1958. In 1950s America, a forceful, male-dominated Abstract Expressionism held sway over the art world. Kusama's monochrome abstract paintings, built from stoic repetition and proliferation, seemed to stand in opposition to it. They drew considerable attention and acclaim, and Kusama secured a firm reputation as an artist. Her etchings offer a glimpse into the very roots of the creative practice and thinking that underlie these signature works, which hold an important place in art history.

In 1993, Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. This led to a broad reassessment of her work dating back to the 1950s, and the artist herself gained a freer realm in which to create. In printmaking as well, she undertook a variety of experiments, such as using glitter to lend her prints a twinkling, shimmering light, and adopting the ukiyo-e method, in which carvers and printers divide the work between them. In a group of prints made between 2011 and 2012, she incorporated imagery from My Eternal Soul, the series of paintings she had been working on since 2009. Kusama produced more than 400 prints in total. Pressing forward with an unceasing, prodigious drive to create, she was like a seeker on a path devoted to art. Opening up new horizons and pressing on with every ounce of her energy: this cycle never stopped throughout her life.