Yayoi Kusama was born in the
country of Japan on the island of
Honshu, in a town called
Matsumoto city. An old palace
made of wood and stone
overlooked a moat where swans
swam; the streets were lined with
little shops; and snow-copped
mountains rose in the distance,
swallowing up the sun as it went
down in the evening.
Yayoi's family owned nurseries where all kinds of flowers and vegetables grew
and workers tended the plants as they matured from seed to sprout to stalks.
But Yayoi yearned for a different life, far from the countryside. She dreamed
about what laid beyond the mountains in places far from Matsumoto city.
She longed to leave home and see the world.
Yayoi's mother wanted her to stay home and learn old-fashioned
manners - how to dress elegantly, walk demurely, eat politely and find
a proper husband.
But Yayoi wanted to be an artist. Every day she went outside with ink
and brushes, and paper. She drew things that she saw and things she
imagined. She looked closely at the pebbles that lined the riverbed
and at the leaves and stalks of the plants and she drew them as chain
of tiny cells that looked like dots.
When she was older and studying in art school, her teachers
disapproved of her works and they demanded that Yayoi painted in
the traditional prosaic Japanese style. Yayoi wanted to go where she
could live without rules.
It was her first airplane trip. There were only four other
passengers and the weather was stormy with rain and
When she was 28 years old, she packed up her silk
lighting.
kimonos and thousands of drawings and stuffed
dollar bills into the toes of her shoes.
The airplane wobbled and dipped as it flew to America.
In New York, Yayoi went to the top of the
Empire State Building in a city full of top
buildings. When she looked down, she
saw busses and cars and yellow taxes
zooming up and down the avenues, and
bankers and teachers and artists rushing
to work; form up on the eighty-sixth floor
they looked like dots.
She felt very far from quiet Matsumoto
city and her mother rules. Here it seemed
that anything was possible.
Yayoi set about turning her drawings of dots into
paintings. The dollar bills that she had brought to
America quickly ran out, and she spent what little money
she had left and paints and canvases. She worked day
and night. She painted when she was cold, she painted
when she was hungry, she painted when she was lonely.
And she turned her dots into sculptures too, into soft
stuffed that covered sofas and chairs and boots.
She was devoted to her dots.
For her, they were a way of thinking about the world
among us as one dot among millions of others; they were
ways of thinking about infinity.
Sometimes when she grew frustrated, she visited the
museum of modern art. She gazed at painting by other
artists' and she thought about why and how they were
made. She looked at pictures of dancing girls and night
skies trying to solve them as if they were puzzles.
Her paintings seemed so different from those she had
seen at MoMA. When she at last was ready to show her
work in public, she invited all the friends she had made in
New York. When she arrived at the gallery, a crowd was
spilling out onto the sidewalk. Her friends lifted her into
the air, shouting:
“Yayoi, you've finally done it!”
Word about her artwork spread quickly.
Her friends told their friends,
newspapers wrote about her work, and
reporters clamored to interview her
about her dots. Now she began to show
them in other cities all over the United
States and in Europe.
Her dots were covering the
world. They appeared in
Venice in thousands of
Dutch-shaped mirrors,
scattered over a big green
lawn. And on a pumpkin,
on a pear...
…and on dresses, and
t-shirts, and people
walking down the street,
and in mere rooms were
glowing dots reflected
and reflected again. It
was an infinity of dots.
Having visited many countries all over
the world, Yayoi returned to Japan.
The country had changed since she
left, with many different artists
challenging the old traditional style as
Yayoi had been doing all along.
Yayoi Kusama still lives in Japan and
she continues to paint her dots every
day.
