Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Australia
Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years

Acclaimed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) has experienced mental illness since childhood when she began hallucinating about fields of dots and flowers, which subsequently became central motifs in her paintings and sculptures. An ambitious artist, Kusama moved to the United States in 1957. Today aged 80, she continues to make art.

Renowned early installations such as Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (1965) along with recent immersive environments including Fireflies on the Water (2000) and Clouds (2008) provide insight into the creative energy of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and her lifelong preoccupation with the perceptual, visual and physical worlds.

Working across different media and forms that include painting, collage, sculpture, installation and film, as well as performance and its documentation, Kusama creates works that reveal a fixation with repetition, pattern and accumulation. Describing herself as an “obsessive artist”, her work is intensely sensual, infused with autobiographical, psychological and sexual content, notably in her parodies of phallic power.